Ruchira Gupta has built a two-decade legacy of fighting for the rights of women who fall victim to intergenerational prostitution due to caste, poverty and gender discrimination at home. Ruchira Gupta’s Emmy Award-winning documentary “The sale of Innzenzen“ examined the plight of Nepalese women trafficked to India.
In 2002, she founded Apne Aap Women Worldwide, an international NGO to combat sex trafficking. At Apne Aap, she has played an active role in enabling women to form self-help groups, enabling the so-called Denotified Tribes to receive government ID cards and government funding, and providing legal support to the children of prostituted women in filing cases against human traffickers to offer.
International awards such as the French Ordre National du Mérite, the Clinton Global Citizen Award and the UN-NGO CSW Woman of Distinction testify to her efforts to secure women’s rights across various aspects of marginalization. She is also an outstanding author, and her first novel, “I Kick and I Fly,” received widespread acclaim.
In an interview with FII, Ruchira Gupta talks about the current status of trafficked women’s rights in India and the role that citizens can play in improving gender equality in society.
FII: Given your work on the rights of women in prostitution for more than two decades, do you think that the feminist movement in India has somehow ignored the human rights of victims of human trafficking?
Ruchira Gupta: There are many feminist movements in India and each has a different approach, ideology, way of thinking based on their context, upbringing and location. At Apne Aap, for example, we fight for the human rights of victims of human trafficking and also of people at risk.
Source: Apne Aap
And we define human rights as the right not to be prostituted. By bodily autonomy we mean the control over not selling one’s own body. But there are other groups in India who also call themselves feminists and they will say that we believe in the right to prostitution and to sell our bodies and that is a human right. So there is a big debate in the women’s movement.
There are several sides, as some people will say, we want prostitution decriminalized and we want the buyers punished; Some people may say we want prostitution to be decriminalized and even the buyers and the traffickers to be decriminalized as well. So there are different things and the human rights based approach to human trafficking, sex trafficking and prostitution requires that we also address the dignity of the individual and that’s something a lot of feminists are divided on again, right?
What is the dignity of the individual? Is it because you are called a prostitute? Is it because you are called a sex worker? And for me personally, both fail to take into account the reality of the women being trafficked. I use the term “prostituted woman” or “prostituted child” because I think words like “sex worker” somehow sterilize all the exploitation that she experiences physically, mentally, socially and economically. It also stigmatizes the victim, not the perpetrator. So, yes, I feel like human rights encompass a broad spectrum of things.
My personal approach is based on a human rights framework, particularly the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which states that economic and social rights have the same importance as human rights and each serves as a foundation for the other. Therefore, I consider prostitution to be a form of violence against women because it is based on physical violence, regardless of the circumstances.
I feel that some of the women’s groups within the feminist movements have a very narrow definition of human rights, which is only about the right for a woman to choose to be a prostitute, but not anything else that violates her rights .
FII: Do you think the new criminal laws adequately take into account the rights of victims of human trafficking?
Ruchira Gupta: No, I don’t think it addresses that because it narrowed the definition of sexual exploitation. It has also narrowed the definition of the perpetrator. The people they are talking about are the ones who use oxytocin to fatten up girls and then sell them etc. But that’s not the only type of traffickers. Traffickers can be ordinary people from villages or cities who come to slums or settlements and just cheat or deceive; Maybe they don’t use violence in any way, right?
And so the new criminal law has narrowed the definitions of both perpetrator and victim. This means that women are excluded from services because the law does not define them as vulnerable or victims. And men are not punished because they are not defined as perpetrators. So there is a problem with the new law.
FII: Why is there so much silence about sexual violence against women in prostitution?
Ruchira Gupta: Prostitution is commercial rape. I always say that. It’s just paid, but for the woman the experience is the same. And you know this, because it is not the case that she enjoys it, and very often her body parts are injured, torn, she falls ill with diseases, and in prostitution the old age pension is sickness and death. Prostitution is commercial rape, and yet we have a different attitude towards women in prostitution or prostituted women than we do towards educated, middle class women when they are raped.
Source: Shutterstock
And somehow, rape in factory-like brothels across the country is a problem that is obvious but invisible. Since they are illiterate, poor and come from marginalized castes and communities, their rape is considered inevitable, whereas the rape of educated women from upper or middle classes causes horror and creates movements.
For example, in the Unnao rape case, the woman spoke out and was burned, and her rapist’s father and the rapist were given high positions in a political party. So there is unequal treatment between excluded and non-excluded people.
So you have to take responsibility at every level; It can’t just be the rapist. And then people at all levels need to not only be held accountable, but also trained to develop the gendered mindset that this whole focus on female bodies to send messages to women or women as property or the fact that men are entitled to Having women’s bodies means it has to change. And this is also based on our understanding that women’s bodies cannot be purchased.
The women marching in the streets cannot say that we want one group of rapists to be held accountable and the other not. When there are customers who buy women’s bodies, they feel that they are entitled to women’s bodies. And so a culture develops in a society that leads to more and more demands. So we have to say: no hypocrisy.
FII: Have the institutional barriers to combating prostitution, which you often mention in your lectures, been reduced in the last decade?
Ruchira Gupta: After Jyoti Singh Pandey’s rape, the situation improved for some time because we saw a sort of awakening of the women’s movement and the government responded. In December the rape happened, and in April we had new laws and women were speaking out more openly on television, in magazines, on campus, everywhere, and being respected for it. They were not stigmatized. But after that we were faced with a backlash in which the scope that had opened up narrowed again.
Source: NYT
We have a political elite that is extremely patriarchal and also thinks in the middle, right? You belong to an organization made up entirely of men. They do not allow female members of the ruling party. The other thing is that they believe in the head of the family, like a man is the head of the family, a hierarchy in which a woman is below the man who is the head of the family, whether he is the father or the husband is.
The image of a good woman is equally disgusting. Regressive norms about who is a good woman also contribute to a toxic rape culture that targets women who are independent, employed, and self-employed. In India, there are many cases of gang rape – not individual rape, but gang rape, which is also almost like a spectator sport; Men come together.
It’s really about dominance. And so this culture needs to be thought about really, really clearly.
FII: How do you think men can become more sensitive by unlearning the patriarchal tropes that objectify a woman? What role did Apne Aap play in this?
Ruchira Gupta: Apne Aap has tried to promote the idea of a gentleman, especially at a time when people only worship the strong man and elect strong men as their leaders and then further promote toxic masculinity which further promotes gender hierarchies and roles for women that are subversive.
Source: Apne Aap
We launched the Cool Men Don’t Buy Sex campaign to combat the culture of toxic masculinity. The first round of the campaign took place on campuses run by male students. And it was the law change in India after the rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey where we said that prostitution was commercial rape and the traffickers and sex buyers had to be punished. As part of this campaign, we were able to send 10,000 signatures to the President demanding that prostitutes should not be punished.
And we succeeded to a certain extent. So we were able to create a new law, Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code, which decriminalizes victims of human trafficking and criminalizes traffickers. But we couldn’t get the law to punish sex buyers. We couldn’t go that far.
FII: Is there a message for the younger generation of male activists fighting against gender inequality?
Ruchira Gupta: Speak out against all forms of gender-based violence, break the silence and become our allies.
» Editor’s note: The interview has been paraphrased and condensed for clarity.