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Massey University
Empowering sex workers to quit India’s largest red-light district has consumed Kiwi humanitarian worker Pip Rea for the past seven years.
She aims to share her insights on what is an ultimately heartening story – of how prostitutes from the poorest of backgrounds are making a fresh start.
She is halfway through researching a Development Studies master’s project by distance at Massey University.
She said that her findings on the role of resilience among prostitutes will surprise many people.
The former nurse lives in the heart of Sonagachi, the red-light district of Kolkata, where an estimated 10,000 sex workers are employed. Many have been illegally trafficked as young as age 13, from surrounding West Bengal villages, Nepal and Bangladesh.
Holistic Care
Rea is the director of Tamar, a charitable non-governmental trust that works with a private company, Freeset. For the past 17 years, Freeset has provided jobs, vocational training and literacy education for women who want to leave the sex trade. Tamar focuses on holistic healthcare and housing, helping sex workers with the HIV prevention and treatment, pregnancy, botched illegal abortions, as well as overcoming alcohol and drug addiction.
Rea left New Zealand seven years ago at the invitation of a family friend on the board of Freeset who wanted someone to set up a healthcare programme for former sex workers employed in its Fair-Trade textile operation making bags and T Shirts.
She was not ‘super excited’ about living in a crowded city of 15 million people.
“I like my open spaces, beaches and those things.”
But after a week, she fell in love with what the people at Freeset were doing.
“It made sense. It was working.”
Tricked women
Women were tricked and trafficked into sex trade.
She agreed to set up a health programme encompassing emotional care and counselling, and building partnerships with businesses to provide alternative employment for former sex workers.
She has expanded Tamar’s activities beyond its Kolkata base and is now working with villages in West Bengal and Nepal through businesses to help repatriate women back home and provide them with work.
Traffickers prey on villages of immense poverty, she said.
In the most common scenario, young teen girls aged between 13 and 15 are offered employment as domestic workers then brought into the city and sold into the sex trade, which is illegal but not properly policed.
“Sadly, a lot of the police are complicit and some even directly involved.”
Sex trafficking impacts
It is easy to assume from afar that the impact of sex trafficking and the poverty and powerlessness that led to it, might render many women damaged beyond repair. But this is far from the truth, Rea said.
“What constantly amazes me is how these women have gone through immense trauma, being trafficked and just their life circumstances. Yet they have maintained such resilience and such a desire to leave and create a better life,” she said.
‘Women’s resilience outweighs trauma’ is the base of her research.
“I realised that I was in a unique situation where I had a platform in academia for their voices to be heard in a way that maybe hadn’t been heard in the past.”
Rea works on her thesis part-time and runs Tamar.
Her research has involved interviewing women about their lives prior to entering the sex trade as well as their experiences during and after it.
Concepts of community and solidarity are emerging to help explain the high levels of resilience she is witnessing.
She suspected that the effect of strong, positive family relationships early in life despite the extreme poverty of their circumstances is a factor.
She hopes that her research will show that women who have exited the sex trade can still lead successful lives – holding down a good job, providing for their families and changing their children’s lives.
A part of her job involves visiting brothels and talking to women who are still in the trade, and informing them of the alternatives.
However, the youngest girls are locked away.
“We do not get access to them – we usually deal with girls aged 18 upwards.”
Local Culture
Rea’s academic exploration of a complex problem reflects her deep personal connection to the place and people. She made a point of immersing herself into the culture at the outset and can communicate with locals in Bengali, which she speaks fluently.
She completed a full-time language study and then full immersion, living for three years in a 2 x2 metre room of a house shared with other Bengali women who spoke no English, in a red-light district building.
“It was hard because we did not have any mod cons – no fridge, shower or hot water. It was good for my language learning and for understanding of Bengali culture but it was hard work!”
“I recognised that as a foreigner coming into this context there are numerous barriers to relationships and understanding the dynamics of a culture. I was the stranger. I was the different one. And I was wanting to know and understand and build relationships.”
Living among locals, she came to appreciate the more collective style of life.
“The whole point was to know and understand and be as much a part of the community as I could, even though I am an outsider.”
Rea grew up in multi-cultural South Auckland and spent 18 months running a health clinic in a small rural village in Ethiopia when she first graduated as a nurse.
She said that the greatest reward of her work is seeing the changes in women’s lives. However, entering the sex trade can lead to a swathe of health problems, such as alcohol abuse and addiction.
Many young girls are given booze when first trafficked “to make them compliant. Often they find it continues to be their coping strategy and they become addicted.”
Tamar partners with rehabilitation centres and helps women develop new coping strategies.
Photo:
- Pip Rea
- A woman of the Red Light District in Kolkata (Photo Credit: Calvina Nguyen)
