JOIN USCovid-19: Sex workers in acute crisis
Even after twenty years as a sex worker, Paliamma* (42) had not encountered a situation that she could not overcome but the coronavirus pandemic has caused immeasurable damage which she fears there is no recovery from. “Even during the HIV epidemic, there was a way to continue with my work. With adequate protection, I found a way to feed myself. Now there seems to be no hope,” she adds.
The lockdowns, this year and the last, have been devastating for her. Even her regular clients have abandoned her. “I understand that they just want to keep themselves safe but how do we survive this?” she asks. Every night in the last two months, she remembers worrying about what she would be feeding her two children.“Some NGOs have been distributing ration kits, which has kept us alive until now. We don’t know what the future will look like,” she says.
Already vulnerable and now left without a livelihood, many sex workers fear what the next few months will bring. For a year now, work has become next to nil, for others like Paliamma, this has meant an inability to pay rent, pay school fees for her children and sometimes skipping meals. House owners, who usually are reluctant to rent to sex workers, have been asking them to vacate.
In a more extreme situation, Hafisa* (37), a sex worker from Raichur, has been choosing which of her illnesses to treat. She is HIV positive. With no bus facilities, she has had difficulty travelling to the centre that distributes her antiretrovirals for free. Left with no other option, she chooses to buy from a pharmacy nearby. “A tablet costs Rs 12 per day. I also have a heart condition and the medication costs Rs 12 per day, I have no income at all, so I’ve chosen to stop the heart medication,” she says. With three children to look after, she often worries that she might be making a wrong decision that could eventually mean that her children would have to fend for themselves. Hafisa feels guilty about not being able to pay for her children’s school fees or for gadgets for them to attend online class, “education is a way to protect them. Even that avenue is not available now.” For more than a year now, her three children have had no way to attend online classes or school.
The Supreme Court last year ordered the state governments to supply dry rations to sex workers who were registered with the National AIDS Control Organisation without insisting on producing ID cards. However, this is yet to be implemented according to Nisha Gulur, vice president of the National Network of Sex Workers. “There is zero support from the government for people from our community, sex workers are in widespread distress,” she says. For now, civil society organisations like Sangama, Sadhana Mahila Sangha and others have organised their volunteers to distribute dry ration kits to provide some relief to a few but even that would not cover other cooking expenses for gas, electricity and vegetables. “People living with HIV also need access to nutritional food. Rice, pulses and aata are just bare necessities, they also need vegetables and fruits for a balanced diet,” adds Gulur.
The Karnataka government announced a one-time cash assistance of Rs 3,000 to provide relief to unorganised workers. However, no such benefit has been extended to sex workers even though the National Human Rights Commission had classified sex workers as informal workers last year in July.
Officials from the Women and Child Development department were unavailable to comment.
Insensitivity
Even before the new rounds of lockdown that came with the onslaught of the second wave, when Dhruthi M*, a sex worker based in Bengaluru, ventured out, she was mercilessly lathi-charged and called names. “The kind of things I am called. One officer even told me to go die as ‘my kind’ were the ones spreading the virus,” she recounts, adding that venturing out for anything during this time is most likely elicit this kind of response. Actions that not only caused physical injuries but were also deeply dehumanising.
Many sex workers like Dhruthi have first-hand accounts of insensitive behaviour that the police and other government authorities display, even claiming that that sex workers had to pay a daily fee to keep some police officers from arresting them. Paliamma says that this kind of insensitivity always comes down to a lack of respect for their profession, “they have no idea of the conditions that led us to take up these jobs,” she says. Married off at the tender age of 14, Paliamma lost her husband at the age of 18 by when she already had two children to look after. “I tried everything, but nothing worked, eventually I came to this profession and was able to feed my children all these years,” she says.
Hafisa says, “They don’t like to look at us, they just want to sweep us up under the rug and forget that we exist but we also have stomachs and we also go hungry, we also have children to look after and people who depend on us.”
(*Names have been changed to preserve privacy)