Jouno kormir shantan

On the evening of 3 March 2009, International Sex Worker Rights Day, over 3000 children of sex workers between the ages of six and 25 marched through College Street in Kolkata. They were demanding both a guarantee of their mothers' right to livelihood as sex workers, as well as their own right, as children, to live free from stigma and discrimination. One of the most popular slogans was against Renuka Chaudhary, then the Women and Child Development Minister of India: 'Renuka chaudhary'r kalo hath guriye dao, guriye dao!' (Smash Renuka Chaudhary's black hand). This provocation came at a time when most of urban India was hailing Chaudhary's tough stand against the high-profile assault by a Hindu rightwing group, the Sri Ram Sene, on women at a Mangalore pub. Yet the children were angry at the proposal by the ministry to amend the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act of 1956 (ITPA), to criminalise clients of sex workers – a move that would have rendered their mothers effectively unemployed. The children were also protesting against an already existing provision in the same law that allows the state to forcibly take away children who were said to be living off their mothers' earnings, living with them after they turned 18. Today, this statute remains on the books.

In the context of trafficking – especially sex trafficking – the focus on children has special prominence in recent years. Documentary films such as the award-winning Born into Brothels (2004) and The Selling of Innocents (1996) have highlighted images of acute vulnerability and suffering. At the same time, these have also proposed a straightjacketed response to 'saving' these children: raid the brothels, and rescue and rehabilitate the children found there. The subtext to this approach is that these children's own cultures, communities or mothers cannot or will not lead to their betterment. Popular representations have thus led to a widespread perception that such children live abandoned lives in 'hellholes', and that the only way to protect them from such 'evil' is to remove them from the situation entirely. Yet civil-society interventions seldom create enabling conditions for these children to enjoy guarantees of child rights, or the opportunity to have any respect for their mothers' livelihoods. Most known civil society interventions' primary concern is first to 'rescue' the children out of the brothels and then train them into civilisation through education.