The fight for women’s safety is never ending, there are still so many unimaginably dark and devious layers to the exploitation the women of India go through every other day and in many different parts of the country. Meet the Perna community that lives on the outskirts of Delhi where prostitution from several generations is being practiced freely, reported by Pacific Standard.
Women of this community expect to be prostituted by their husbands since they’re young. And sure enough, that their women take this as their life routine.
Someone like Rani, a resident of Dharampura and a Perna woman, has made peace with her routine going to prostitute herself at 2.00 am, servicing as many as five customers on a good night, trying to avoid cops the whole time because instead of providing her protection, they demand free sex and take all her money. She returns home at around 7.00 am, makes her six children and her husband breakfast and gets a few hours of sleep.
When Rani thinks back to the day she was married, and how two years after that, she became her husband’s prostitute, she says, “I knew it would happen, it’s very normal,” she said. “I do it for earning for my family.
“It happens to every girl,” says Horbai, another Perna woman. “You get used to it.” She was training to be a tailor when her parents died and she was married off to a stranger by her relatives - who also went on to push her into prostitution to help support the family. And when her husband died, with no other form of income she was forced by circumstances to join the other Perna women in prostitution. But Horbai is happy that her pimp outlived than her husband.
“Maybe if my husband was alive, my daughters would be restricted,” Horbai said. On her own, she’s able to support her family and send her children to school. “So I’m happy for them, but not myself.”
The fact is that while most of them have learned to say that the sex is consensual, they are adamant that they don’t want their daughters to follow in their path for earnings. “That’s why I want them to be educated,” she said.
Unfortunately, the Perna women have little to no control over their daughters’ lives after they are married, usually at a tender age and has to go for prostitution to run family smoothly.
A Perna settlement in Nepal with no roads within two hours of travel, somehow had a thriving system in place that supplied young girls to agents in Kolkata and Mumbai who’d sell them to pimps.
The pimps gave them to brothel managers for “seasoning” - repeated rape - and the girls were then kept in bonded labour, expected to service 10 or more customers a night for an average of Indian rupees 200.
If rape happens in Delhi, everyone gets excited,”… “But these women are raped every day.” said Abhilasha Kumari, director of Apne Aap.
Large parts of the modern world’s population fight to make adult prostitution legal, saying that a woman should have the choice to make a living however she pleases. Meanwhile, Abhilasha Kumari of Apne Aap, a non-profit advocacy organisation, raises a simple question:
“If you are forced into sex work when you’re just 10 years old and then told you can’t leave, exactly what choice are you exercising?”
“Women in India are in danger from the time they are conceived until the time they die,”… “They could be victims of sex-selective abortion, if they are born they may be left out to die, if they survive they’ll get less food than their brothers, be pulled out of school to help with chores at home, be married early, risk death during pregnancy, be sold into prostitution, or die begging as widows,” said Rukshira Gupta, founder of Apne Aap.
Women like Rani and Horbai accept their present and look to the future with faint and abstract concept of hope - and simply pray that their daughters get more from life than they did.
Fight is still on for women’s safety in India. A lot efforts are needed to get rid of exploitation against women of such suppressed communities.
