In India, sex workers’ children challenge taboos to help the needy
- Women from the Kranti centre have distributed food to 3,000 others in Mumbai’s red-light districts, and are raising funds for relief work
- They hope to help society understand their backgrounds, and overcome the stigma surrounding sex workers and their families
Sandhya Nair’s favourite childhood memory is of listening to bedtime tales from the woman she called Amma – Hindi for mother. She was a transgender sex worker, and Nair’s next-door neighbour.
“Every night, while my mother worked, Amma fed me and told me stories until I drifted off into my dreams,” said the 23-year-old, who grew up in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s largest red-light district.
Nair said she thought of Kamathipura as safe. Once, when a man spotted her in the brothel and asked how much it would cost to sleep with her, she said every sex worker around leapt to her defence: “They screamed, ‘don’t you dare go near her, she is our daughter!’”
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“All my life I hated my mother for doing sex work, for the implications it had on me,” Nair said.
That was until 2015, when she happened upon the Kranti centre. Run by a Mumbai NGO, the live-in centre specialises in empowering the daughters of sex workers to become agents of social change. A critical part of its work includes inspiring the women to understand their mothers by looking deeper into their choices, and embracing their past.
They were inspired to start distributing the food after receiving a distress call from a sex worker who lives in the Kamathipura neighbourhood, telling of how she was unable to put food on the table after work dried up amid the nationwide lockdown.
“On reaching the brothel, we realised there were many more who were going hungry,” Nair said.
The group has also cooked as many as 200 fresh meals per day for daily wage earners living in the slums who lost their jobs because of the pandemic, as well as patients discharged from hospital who had nowhere else to go.
Nair and the other women hope that by sharing their stories they can help society understand their backgrounds better, and the stigma surrounding sex workers and their families can be overcome. They have also toured the United States and Europe with a play that aims to raise awareness and change misconceptions about sex workers.
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“It took me a few years, but now I understand that it wasn’t my mother’s fault that she was trafficked at 14 years of age and later continued to do sex work to support her seven siblings,” Nair said.
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Hundreds of organisations and individuals across India have stood up for the underprivileged with relief initiatives, but Nair said the idea of helping women who do sex work had not occurred to many. “Entering a red-light area even for relief work can be shameful for most people,” she said. “Who wants to help a sex worker who is considered a disgrace to society?”
Taniya Yadav, a Zumba instructor and another resident of the Kranti home, said: “It is very hard to be a sex worker; there’s only stigma and no acceptance.”
Yadav, 23, said she had been able to fully comprehend this only in the past few years, after her multiple interactions with sex workers in Mumbai. Before that, she blamed her mother – a bar dancer and sex worker – for being mean and unfair to her daughters.
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“When I was 13, my mum left me and my sister with her violent partner, and disappeared,” she said. For three years, he unleashed his wrath on Yadav and raped and beat her regularly. “I was terrified and helpless, and felt like I was living my mother’s life,” she said.
She ran away at 16 and found refuge at Kranti, where through years of psychotherapy and sisterhood she has been able to own her past life and forgive her mother. Yadav said she was now able to understand that violence at both work and home must have added up and forced her mother to quit.
“It took me a long time, but now I understand how stressed she must have been to have left her children,” Yadav said.
For Nair, the past five years at the centre have set her on the path to acceptance. “In my university application, I filled up my mother’s profession as sex work,” she said. “I’m not ashamed any more.”
