Jouno kormir shantan

On the evening of 3 March 2009, International Sex Worker Rights Day, over 3000 children of sex workers between the ages of six and 25 marched through College Street in Kolkata. They were demanding both a guarantee of their mothers' right to livelihood as sex workers, as well as their own right, as children, to live free from stigma and discrimination. One of the most popular slogans was against Renuka Chaudhary, then the Women and Child Development Minister of India: 'Renuka chaudhary'r kalo hath guriye dao, guriye dao!' (Smash Renuka Chaudhary's black hand). This provocation came at a time when most of urban India was hailing Chaudhary's tough stand against the high-profile assault by a Hindu rightwing group, the Sri Ram Sene, on women at a Mangalore pub. Yet the children were angry at the proposal by the ministry to amend the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act of 1956 (ITPA), to criminalise clients of sex workers – a move that would have rendered their mothers effectively unemployed. The children were also protesting against an already existing provision in the same law that allows the state to forcibly take away children who were said to be living off their mothers' earnings, living with them after they turned 18. Today, this statute remains on the books.

In the context of trafficking – especially sex trafficking – the focus on children has special prominence in recent years. Documentary films such as the award-winning Born into Brothels (2004) and The Selling of Innocents (1996) have highlighted images of acute vulnerability and suffering. At the same time, these have also proposed a straightjacketed response to 'saving' these children: raid the brothels, and rescue and rehabilitate the children found there. The subtext to this approach is that these children's own cultures, communities or mothers cannot or will not lead to their betterment. Popular representations have thus led to a widespread perception that such children live abandoned lives in 'hellholes', and that the only way to protect them from such 'evil' is to remove them from the situation entirely. Yet civil-society interventions seldom create enabling conditions for these children to enjoy guarantees of child rights, or the opportunity to have any respect for their mothers' livelihoods. Most known civil society interventions' primary concern is first to 'rescue' the children out of the brothels and then train them into civilisation through education.

Further, while the truth about the plight and vulnerability of children of sex workers cannot be denied, it is not the whole truth. These children are indeed at the receiving end of disadvantage – due to where they live, their mothers' professions, and the burden of their age; at the same time, they are also active in resisting such disadvantages on a daily basis, which are exemplary shows of resilience. Indeed, their age not only results in violation of these children's rights in the first place, particularly because of their circumstances, but is also why compassionate interventions do not consider them as citizens whose say matters. In turn, this tends to disconnect the question of rights from politics when it comes to claiming the human rights of children of sex workers.

Coming together
In 2005, the same year in which Born into Brothels won the Oscar in the US, the children of sex workers in Kolkata's Sonagachhi area started to organise. In this, they drew inspiration from the work that their mothers had been doing with the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a sex-worker collective with over 60,000 members. They called themselves Amra Padatik, meaning 'We are foot-soldiers', and stated, 'Our goal is to establish the rights and dignity of all marginalised people and their children through social and political changes. With our involvement in this global movement, we are determined to improve the quality of life and social status of the sex workers' and their children.'

What is unique about this declaration is the clarity with which children have been able to respond to their own realities; it is this clarity that allows them to move towards building solidarity with other marginalised groups like their efforts to reach out to homeless children in Kolkata, and their protests against Israeli attacks on Gaza and racist attacks in Australia. Since 2005, Amra Padatik (AP) has grown to nearly 1500 members, all children of sex workers from Kolkata and its suburbs. The group's members believe that a primary means to guarantee the rights of sex workers' children is for them to join their mothers' struggles. As Chaitali, Amra Padatik's first president (then a 17-year-old girl, and now 22), says: 'It all began when Gobinda, Mithu and I – all children of sex workers – were discussing how our mothers say that the work they do is not bad, and that they should have their rights. So we started talking to more children like us, and felt that we had some specific problems, and needed to come together to form a collective to be able to address these.' As they began this work, they repeatedly kept confronting one particular question: Why were they, as children, socially disallowed from respecting their mothers' profession, despite the fact that it was her money that ran their house and took care of their education?

A significant event following the group's foundation came when Gobinda – AP's founding secretary, now 18 years old – was refused an admission form following his board exam, due to a television interview in which he had mentioned that he was the child of a sex worker. Thereafter, the group's other children supported him, rallied outside the school, and in the end ensured that he was given the required form. Similarly, when another child was harassed with threats of eviction by a landlord after his mother had died, the children went to the house and made sure that he was not evicted. Mithu (now 28 years old and a founder member of AP) says that one of the central problems for the children of sex workers is legislation stacked against their mothers. According to the ITPA, she says, children of sex workers still cannot live on their mother's earnings after they turn 18. 'But where will children go after that?' she asks. 'You cannot do anything these days with being a graduate, which means at least 21 or 22 years. Is the child of a doctor or lawyer penalised for living off the earnings of their parents at 18 years of age? Because of this, I had to discontinue my schooling.'

It was through the sharing of experiences such as these that Gobinda, Chaitali and Mithu started to reach out to other children of sex workers beyond Sonagachi, urging them to attend meetings and share their own problems. Through the subsequent discussions, agreement emerged that the children needed to define a collective identity for themselves, in order to better advocate for their rights. As such, each Amra Padatik member makes it a point to publicly introduce him- or herself as jouno kormir shantan (child of a sex worker). This is in stark contrast to popular representations (such as in Born into Brothels) that argue that erasing this identity is the only way for such children to escape stigma.

Critics could suggest that this assertion on the part of the Amra Padatik members is reflective of an internalisation of their fate, thus permanently fixing their identity. Yet interactions with members of Amra Padatik suggest a far more complex rationale. Of course it would be incorrect to say that there has been no internalisation whatsoever along these lines. But as one of the children (who did not want to be named) said, 'We are denied rights and dignity because we are jouno kormir shantan … we'll use the strength of calling us by that name to reclaim rights for our mothers and ourselves.' This is a logic similar to homosexuals calling themselves queer, or African Americans calling themselves Black – reclaiming the very term that is used to ridicule them.

The organisation's members have clear aspirations for an 'ideal' childhood and future; but the process of achieving these would typically come at the cost of moving out of the red-light area, since it is assumed that getting an education and living in a brothel are by definition contradictory. Instead, Amra Padatik has been prioritising options that allow them to stay in their local communities. For instance, its members were able to convince the Indira Gandhi National Open University to open a study centre at Sonagachhi in March 2008. Here, children of sex workers who have not finished school but are older than 18 can enrol for free, eventually completing a bridge course called the Bachelor's Preparatory Programme. Even sex workers themselves are joining this course.

A different childhood?

According to popular representations, as in Born into Brothels or Bollywood films like Chandni Bar in which the bar dancer mother fails to prevent her daughter entering prostitution or her son becoming a hoodlum – sex-worker mothers are incompetent parents who care little about their children. But descriptions of the relationships between these children and their mothers offer glimpses of a far more complex experience. Gobinda, for example, says that he shares a very good relationship with his mother, making sure to proudly note that she takes very good care of him. During an interview with these writers, he said that he could not eat with us because his mother had already made lunch for him, and she would feel bad if he missed the meal.

Still, the experience is clearly frustrating at times. Mithu, for instance, remembers being angry with her mother when she was growing up, because she could never tell her friends where she lived. She says she can remember feeling bad when she would see other children 'proudly' going to school. In school, she faced discrimination and ridicule as a child of a sex worker. 'I have told my children, "You tell everyone where you live, and if they still maintain their relationship with you then its fine, otherwise forget them,'" she says. Though Mithu herself is not a sex worker, her mother was, and the 'child of a sex worker' label is something that has stayed with Mithu, and in turn affects her children. Mithu's mother married her off when Mithu was 14 years old because she was scared that her daughter would be forced into prostitution. While Mithu's mother now lives with her, Mithu says that she also shares a strong relationship with her mother's babu, her permanent client, who she calls her father.

While stigma remains a significant reality in their lives, for many children of sex workers the ideal childhood is not about shunning the red-light area where they live. Indeed, several of the children with whom we spoke were emphatic that the act of forcibly taking them away from their mothers in the name of 'rescue' would be no different from trafficking. For instance, the experience related by the 17-year-old current president of Amra Padatik, Pinky, of being at various shelter homes after she was 'rescued' underscores exactly why she is now back in her old community, working for the rights of children like her. 'Shelter homes are a good thing,' she says. 'They can be really helpful for children who are orphans, or whose sex-worker mothers are unable to take care of them. But they shouldn't be like jails where children have no freedom, don't get to eat properly, study properly.' She also says that the shelters can be far more unsafe than remaining at home. 'A friend of mine got so badly beaten up by the [shelter] matron that she broke her spinal cord,' Pinky continues 'A male teacher at the home where I used to live even tried to molest me. Moreover, as children of sex workers – because we carry our stigma everywhere with us – we are even more ill treated in these homes compared to the other children.'

Some see the 'victim' rhetoric offered by films such as Born into Brothels as problematic for additional reasons, too. 'The lives of sex workers and their children have become consumable products in the market,' says Gobinda. 'The mysteries surrounding the places where they live, the criminality of their livelihood, the helplessness in their lives – these have all become very saleable topics for making films. Born into Brothels represents us as children whose lives are perpetually in peril.' Pinky is more ruthless in her criticism. 'Would anyone dare to make a film so unethically on anybody else's child? How can anyone invade anyone's privacy like this?' she asks. 'The directors only show the sex workers speaking in foul language – do you think other people, those who live in good houses, don't [use such] abuse? I know respectable people who live in good houses and ill treat their children, but will anyone tell those people to send their children to shelter homes?'

Clearly these children have had difficult lives. But contrary to such sensationalised footage as that on view in Born into Brothels, the entangled realities of these children's lives do not paint a picture of helplessness so much as one of powerful resilience. The problem with such monochromatic representations of suffering is that they invoke compassion on the back of half-truths about the lives of these children and their mothers. The stereotype that sex workers lead dangerous lives and don't take care of their children only attracts the raid, rescue, rehabilitation routine that is standard operating procedure for 'saving' children of sex workers. On the other hand, given the children of sex workers the opportunity to voice their opinions makes them politically assertive and socially conscious citizens. Stereotypical images of their suffering are something that many such children will also identify with; yet far from despair and fear, in the face of adversity their responses are far more complex, hopeful and strong.

— The writers are human rights lawyers and independent analysts. This essay is part of a larger research and film project funded by Child Rights and You (CRY) and the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT).