Young Indians Break the Cycle of Forced Sex Trade - Here's How

India has over 900,000 sex workers, with rampant underage sex trafficking. Laws that aim to prevent trafficking and sex work do little to protect sex workers and have serious repercussions for their children. Many are banned from going to school because of their mother's profession, and the others usually drop out because of discrimination. Without life skills and education, boys tend to get into drugs and petty crime, and girls often join the sex trade to earn a living.

It was in this context that Ashoka Fellow Paramita Banerjee began working with sex workers and their families in the 1980s. She founded Discovering Inner Knowledge & Sexual Health Awareness (DIKSHA) beginning with a group of 16 teenagers from the red-light district of Kalighat in Kolkata who came together to organize co-ed workshops on sexual and reproductive health. Over the next forty years, DIKSHA has continued to build a national model for breaking the cycle of intergenerational sex work, with young people at the helm. Ashoka's Meghana Parik spoke to Paramita Banerjee.

Meghana Parik: What motivated you to create DIKSHA?

Paramita Banerjee: I was raised in a family of urban upper-middle-class academics who were privileged to receive a higher education. I left my home at the age of 19 to live in slums and downgrade myself. It was a difficult journey, but he taught me some very important things. I learned firsthand how the other half of society lives and that the community itself must drive change for itself and its causes. After a short period of teaching at a university after my master's degree, I quickly realized that this was not for me. I wanted to change the paradigm that denied agency to young people. So I started volunteering with organizations working with women in the brothel sex trade in the red light districts of Kolkata. Their lives and those of their children show how exploitative and discriminatory patriarchy can be.

Parik: What did you learn from those early years of volunteering?

Banerjee: First of all, I found that social welfare and sexual and reproductive health programs in red-light districts had very little engagement with boys and, alarmingly, very little engagement with the community itself. The focus was on removing girls and institutionalizing them in foster homes. These young girls would be brought back to the red-light districts at the age of 16 (the age of majority at the time). They would soon be married off by their mother or run away in hopes of a better life. In a year or two, they would either be sold into the sex trade by their supposed husbands or partners, or pushed into it because of domestic violence at home. Meanwhile, boys growing up in these neighborhoods reportedly resort to smuggling or dealing drugs. This cycle of forced intergenerational sex work pissed me off.

Parik: What solution did you see at the time?

Banerjee: One day, while discussing underage marriage with a group of teenage girls, a 15-year-old girl stood up and asked, "Why do girls always have to appropriate? Why can't boys refuse to marry someone under 18? Why can't boys refuse to take dowry? Something clicked in my head and I realized that we had to work with boys and girls together. The organization I was volunteering for found the idea of ​​mixed classes weird, so I found another one - Indrani Sinha's Sanlaap - who left me the try, provided I raise my own funds. I was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for Leadership Development to fund this experience and care for my daughters as a single mother. DIKSHA was born out of this idea that we could e . ..