Quiz Pooja Sinha on the problems in her neighbourhood and she rolls her eyes and smiles wryly. For this 15-year-old lives in Rambagan, a Kolkata red light district.
“So many bad things happen here. There’s lots of sexual harassment because men assume that all girls are sex workers. They make personal comments and grab us if we walk down the streets at night,” she says.
Her friend Sankar Shaw, 14, chips in. “There’s always a lot of noise and fighting, and the men are drunk and smoking drugs from early in the morning. Often children can’t sleep until midnight but many of us have to be up at 5.30am for school. Then we are tired so don’t do well in our studies,” he adds.
One of an estimated 400 red light areas in India and 27 in Kolkata, Rambagan is home to about 750 female sex workers – a tiny fraction of the 100,000 streetwalkers, brothel prostitutes and call girls thought to operate in the city.
The most vulnerable people in the red light districts are the children. Poverty and exploitation conspire against those who want a future away from sex work, pimping or drug dealing. No government support exists in this neighbourhood – a legal no-man’s land that is tolerated but on the margins of Kolkatan society.
It’s dark and edgy when I visit Rambagan to meet Veena Lakhumalani, director of local NGO Cini Asha, and some local children. Sinha, Shaw and their friends tell how they have raised their problems in a children’s parliament – a Unicef-backed scheme aimed at giving marginalised youngsters a voice and teaching them about their rights, and attended by government representatives.
The odds are stacked against them though, admits Lakhumalani. “These are dangerous areas – kids are at risk from the clients, the madams, the noise and the poor sanitation and pollution. They can be tempted into substance abuse from nine or 10, and are at risk of sexual abuse and trafficking,” she says.
“Nothing is hidden – they see their mothers selling themselves and suffering violence, and boys are often sent to buy drink and drugs for the clients. This is no place for entertainment – all they see around them is sex, and alcohol and drugs.”
Many young girls come under pressure to join “the profession” from the age of about 14. Parents who want to avoid this may marry daughters off very young. Boys often get into trouble with the law. Their only chance is education.
Lakhumalani sighs: “Even that’s not easy when you live somewhere like this though. If they don’t have somewhere to study then children are at high risk of dropping out of school because they can’t cope with the academic pressure, which in India is very high.”
After dark is when the youngsters are at their most vulnerable, because they have nowhere to go. Sex workers need their tiny slum rooms so their children roam the streets. Other locals rent their homes out to “flying” sex workers – women who come to Rambagan to work – so their kids too have nowhere to play or study.
The situation led Cini Asha to set up a network of evening coaching centres in the early 1990s. The charity, which also runs drop-in centres for street kids, saw that protecting the children at night and supporting their education was the only way to give them options. Similar schemes are run by other NGOs in several of Kolkata’s other red light districts.
Today Cini’s centres and crèches are staffed by teachers from within the community and attended by more than 450 children. The nightly sessions help bridge the gap between those whose mothers are sex workers and their peers, and many have gone on to do well and school and university and found good jobs.
As well as tuition in basic curriculum subjects, youngsters do drama and music and receive counselling. Older children learn about issues such as reproductive health, HIV and Aids, drugs and relationships.
A support group has been established for the high number of teens who are out of school. Older children work as peer educators and act as the eyes and ears on trafficking – tipping off staff when new girls arrive in the neighbourhood or when girls disappear. “Graduates” from the centres are now working in everything from medical research to business and the media.
Former sex worker Hansi Mali sent her son Somnath, now 30, to the classes from the age of 13. He stayed on at school, gained a degree in commerce and now works in marketing for the pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson and lives in another area of the city.
She is convinced that if he had not received such support, he would have drifted into criminality. “When I was working my son had to spend the evenings alone. “The situation used to be much worse for young people here before these centres opened. They were roaming around and getting into bad habits and trouble, or staying at home, maybe under the bed, while their mothers were working,” says Mali, now 48, who ended up in sex work following a broken marriage.
“If girls didn’t go to school and got involved with boys, everyone would say that they may as well become sex workers. Now though the children have somewhere to go.”
Results of programmes like this are difficult to quantify but a study carried out by Cini three years ago found that up to 60 per cent of Rambagan’s women were now flying sex workers – not resident in the neighbourhood. The charity hopes to follow the research up over the coming year.
This, plus the fact that many students have studied well with help from the centres and found careers out of the profession, is result enough for Lakhumalani.
“It’s still not a perfect situation, and children are still growing up with their homes being rented out to sex workers and surrounded by all these vices. But at least this shows that we’ve helped to prevent second-generation sex work,” she says.
“Those who have grown up here don’t want their mothers to be doing this anymore and try to take them out of the profession. They are getting married well and doing proper jobs. Many are staying in this area and working with us in their own neighbourhoods. It takes time to make a real difference but these are small yet significant results.”
* This piece was published in New Start magazine, mid 2009.