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Sexual behaviour and practices: A study of Female Sex Workers in Mumbai

Due to higher use of condoms in commercial sex and very low use with spouses, no effort was made to understand the variation in condom use with sex workers and wives. However, a logistic regression analysis was performed to understand the predictors of condom use with casual female partners. It has been found that the level of education of the study clients seems to have a significant bearing on condom use. The higher is the level of education, higher is the chance of using a condom. In case of girl friends, education also does not seem to have a significant

Choice in the labour market – sex work as “work”

A blog post by Nivedita Menon on Kafila, 6 May 2011. The summary of preliminary findings of the first pan-India survey of sex-workers is now available on-line. 3000 women from 14 states and 1 UT were surveyed, all of them from outside collectivised/organised and therefore politically active spaces, precisely “in order to bring forth the voices of a hitherto silent section of sex workers.” The significant finding is this: About 71 percent of them said they had entered the profession willingly. (The data on male and transgender sex workers has not been processed yet). The study was conducted by Rohini Sahni

'Saving' Children : Documentary Born into Brothels ignores local organizing efforts

This piece originally appeared in Samar 19: Spring, 2005 Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids, released theatrically in December 2004, won the 2005 Oscar for Best Documentary. The filmmakers describe their film as “A tribute to the resiliency of childhood and the restorative power of art, Born into Brothels is a portrait of several unforgettable children who live in the red light district of Calcutta, where their mothers work as prostitutes. Zana Briski, a New York-based photographer, gives each of the children a camera and teaches them to look at the world with new eyes.” The film industry’s recognition

Is Child to Adult as Victim is to Criminal? Social Policy and Street-Based Sex Work in the United States

Nigeria. Professor advocates registration of #sexworkers http://t.co/AOCLjpxY Gridlock: Labor, migration, and human trafficking in Dubai. Interesting discussion on #sexwork and trafficking http://t.co/5nxxsltv Kenya. Study finds lack of a male guardian associated with female entry into #sexwork in an urban settlement http://t.co/j2dEfptk Identifying the HIV Transmission Bridge: Which Men Are Having Unsafe Sex with Female #Sexworkers & Their Own Wives ? http://t.co/AdXwO2mR Australia Major conference on #sexworker rights, HIV to hear from Della Bosca – Gay News Network http://t.co/9GS3BZHv

The Sonagachi project: A sustainable community intervention program

An article by Jana, S, Basu, I, Rotheram-Borus, M.J., and Newman, P.A in the journal AIDS Education and Prevention 16(5), 405-414. High rates of HIV infection among sex workers in India indicate the importance of understanding the process of establishing a sustainable community intervention programme. The Sonagachi Project, based in Calcutta, India, has been associated with lower HIV rates among sex workers as compared to other urban centres in India. The programme defined HIV as an occupational health problem and included multifaceted, multilevel interventions addressing community (having a high-status advocate; addressing environmental barriers and resources), group (changing social relationships), and

Epistemic fault lines in biomedical and social approaches to HIV prevention

This paper raises the question of how knowledge creation is organized in the area of HIV prevention and how this concatenation of expertise, resources, at-risk people and viruses shapes the knowledge used to impede the epidemic. It also seeks to trouble the discourses of biomedical pre-eminence in the field of HIV prevention by examining the claim for treatment as prevention, looking at evidence constructed through the biomedical frame and through the lens of the sociology of science. These questions lie within a larger socio-historical context of lagging worldwide attention and funding to prevention in the HIV area and, in particular,

Beyond compassion: Children of sex workers in Kolkata’s Sonagachi

Article in Childhood August 2011 vol. 18, no. 3, 333-349. In 2005, children of sex workers from Kolkata’s Sonagachi red-light district formed their own collective, Amra Padatik (‘We are Foot Soldiers’), to work to gain dignity for their mothers and claim their own rights as children of sex workers. In this article the authors speak to Amra Padatik’s founder members to demystify the culture of fear associated with their lives — perpetuated through popular representations. This is not to underplay their acute experiences of disadvantage, but to foreground them as politically astute citizens and decision-makers in policies that concern and

Harsh realities: Reasons for women's involvement in sex work in India

This study, in the Journal of AIDS and HIV Research Vol. 3(9), pp. 172-179, documents the reasons and processes for involvement of women into sex work in India. The study is based on in-depth interviews with a cross-section of commercial sex workers in four Indian states – Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. It shows that most women enter sex work due to a complex set of reasons as opposed to any one single over-riding reason. While abject poverty was cited as the main cause by almost three-fourths of the women interviewed, lack of education, financial freedom, domestic violence, family responsibility,

Using mathematical modelling to estimate the impact of periodic presumptive treatment on the transmission of sexually transmitted infections and HIV among female sex workers.

In settings with poor sexually transmitted infection (STI) control in high-risk groups, periodic presumptive treatment (PPT) can quickly reduce the prevalence of genital ulcers, Neisseria gonorrhoeae (NG) and Chlamydia trachomatis (CT). However, few studies have assessed the impact on HIV. Mathematical modelling is used to quantify the likely HIV impact of different PPT interventions. METHODS: A mathematical model was developed to project the impact of PPT on STI/HIV transmission amongst a homogeneous population of female sex workers (FSWs) and their clients. Using data from Johannesburg, the impact of PPT interventions with different coverages and PPT frequencies was estimated. A sensitivity

Communication and community mobilization, anti-trafficking and legitimization, participation and empowerment: HIV/AIDS intervention and the Sonagachi Project

HIV/AIDS infection is a serious threat to the health and welfare of India. HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections (STI) are primarily propagated through heterosexual intercourse in India. Sex workers having multiple partners are considered to be conduits of virus transmission. Hence interventions targeting sex workers form a significant part of India’s effort to curb the HIV/AIDS pandemic within its borders. The Sonagachi Project is a HIV/AIDS intervention program in India that targets sex workers. The initiative is being undertaken in a red light district of Calcutta, India. The district, which houses more than 50,000 sex workers, is the largest of

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