NCW is on the right track: We should legalise commercial sex work

The National Commission for Women (NCW) appears to be on the verge of recommending the legalisation of commercial sex work. Whether this will pass muster in a country where government is hesitating to abolish even patently unconstitutional laws like section 377 of the IPC, which criminalises consenting gay sex, and where conservatives get hot under the collar about even kissing in public, is another matter. But the recommendation, if it is finally approved by the top leadership of NCW, will be revolutionary for India - and the world. The world is today awash with sex – both legal and illegal. Pornography is available at the click of a computer mouse, and in most countries, sex for money is always on offer, whether it is formally legal or illegal. In the land of the Kama Sutra, it is surprising that we should ever have banned commercial sex work when it has led to more, not less, exploitation of women. [caption id=“attachment_1785277” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reuters[/caption] In a corrupt society, bans always take away the power of agency from those who can legitimately wield it and hand it over to pimps, policemen and the law’s enforcers. In a corrupt society, bans work against the weakest of the weak, not the powerful. As a people, we should be more careful about proscribing anything. It is thus worth looking at the many arguments that will be used to retain the ban on sex work before debunking it. My simple proposition is this: if a woman (or a man, for that matter), of her own will, decides that earning money from sex work is fine with her after being told of the risks, it is wrong to prevent her from doing so. Can sex between consenting adults ever be wrong just because some money changes hands? By this yardstick, loveless marriages that subsist only for economic reasons should be illegal as well. In the west, the opposition to sex work comes from two groups: Christian religious groups, and feminists. The former oppose sex work as immoral. Not just sex work, but even contraception between married partners is opposed by the Catholic church. Mother Teresa was one of those who was dead against birth control. Religious arguments cannot be refuted because they are based on faith, and not reason. Anyone can ban anything by claiming my holy book or prophet says so. It is the feminist argument, which probably originates partly in the same guilt induced by religious teaching, that needs proper refutation. If the basic feminist position is that a woman has the exclusive right over her body and is empowered to make informed choices about it (including aborting a child), then it makes no sense to ban sex work that is chosen voluntarily. A ban would thus amount to some women imposing controls on another women’s right to what she does with her body. In the Nordic countries, this feminist argument has taken new twists by making men guilty of seeking sex, but not women for offering it. Demand for sex is criminal, not supply. If it takes two to make sex, this position is ridiculous. But the idea, which originated with the Swedes, has expanded to many countries, and the European Union itself may adopt the idea of criminalising only the male part of the sex transaction. As The Economist wrote in a recent cover issue on the business of sex: “This new consensus is misguided, as a matter of both principle and practice. Banning the purchase of sex is as illiberal as banning its sale. Criminalisation of clients perpetuates the idea of all prostitutes as victims forced into the trade. Some certainly are - by violent partners, people-traffickers or drug addiction. But there are already harsh laws against assault and trafficking. Addicts need treatment, not a jail sentence for their clients.” When many countries are moving towards decriminalising the use of a potentially harmful drug like cannabis (Netherlands has even legalised them for personal use), making something that happens between two consenting adults illegal in this day and age boggles the mind. Another argument against legalising sex work is that many women are forced into it by poverty or their personal economic conditions. This reason is particularly true for India, where poverty levels are high, and hence women may be pushed towards sex work for lack of alternatives. Here again, one has to distinguish between forced sex work (when done through trafficking and without the consent of the woman concerned) and sex work chosen due to economic necessity alone. In a poor country, many people are forced to choose back-breaking manual labour because they have no other option. In fact, back-breaking work like smashing stones in quarries and carrying mounds or earth to build mud ponds and embankments are what NREGA is all about. This is not the kind of work many people may voluntarily choose to do if they have options, but they do choose it because they need the money. Sex work done voluntarily by the poor falls in the same category. The only remedy for it is to expand job opportunities for the poor by creating better jobs, not by banning what work is readily available in the name of morality. Another worry is risk. When women offer sex for a fee to multiple customers, the chances of being infected by clients (and infecting them, in turn) with sexually-transmitted diseases are high. But the remedy is clearly to give women better knowledge about the risks and access to medical help. Banning sex work will only make check-ups and treatment more difficult, since the mere fact that you have an infection will mean you have indulged in something illegal. You will then depend more on quacks than proper medical help. Reducing the risk of sexually-transmitted diseases, in fact, is the strongest argument in favour of legalising sex work. It is time we as a society – in fact, even western society – got out of the habit of telling what people should do or not do. The line to draw is at the point where sex work is not voluntarily chosen after one is told of the risks. The rewards, of course, are well understood. In India, where marital rape, child sex, and sexual harassment at home and the workplace are bigger worries than paid sex, it would be tantamount to chasing imaginary moral lapses when there are more real criminalities to go after.