Random Thoughts on ITPA

This is part of a reply to a friend who's a Human Rights researcher who'd asked me what I thought of the ITPA amendments.

Prostitution shouldn't exist in an ideal society but the fact is that we don't live in a society which even remotely resembles Utopia, and as such, I believe that prostitution should be legalised since that would at the very least be a mechanism to afford some sort of protection to sex-workers who are, as a group, vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

ITPA (Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, 1986), even as it stands today, has failed in its objective --- it tends to create human rights abuses and does not prevent them. Making prostitution illegal and passing the proposed amendments would be a human rights disaster to my mind.

Today, in this country, prostitution in itself is legal (although trafficking and pimping are illegal) but Commercial Sex Workers are treated like criminals with no rights nonetheless. While ITPA itself does not make prostitution illegal, it might as well have done so since it criminalises the activities required to carry it out and does nothing to help. It makes it illegal to solicit in public places, keep a brothel or allow premises to be used as a brothel, procure a person to work as a prostitute or in immoral trafficking. In addition to this, the law punishes a person for living on the earning of prostitution by saying, "any person over the age of 18 years who knowingly lives, wholly or in part, on the earnings of prostitution shall be punishable with imprisonment. If her partner, parent or adult child is dependent on her income for survival, they are liable to prosecution." Evn though it has been proposed to scrap Section 8 of the Act which deals with the offece of solicitation, God help CSWs if prostitution itself is made illegal because nobody else will.

What I find most scary is that the proposed sections 5A, 5B and 5C not only fail to segregate trafficking from sex work but in fact integrate the two. I think that if at all the law is to be amended to help CSWs, the definition of pimps should be made wider. For example, it should include 'marriage-brokers' who arrange the kind of marriages where women are made wives but treated as unpaid servants by day and sex-slaves by night.

The current amendments remind me of the early Domestic Violence Bills which would have done more harm than good. Domestic violence itself was, for example, not defined --- Under Section 4 (1) of the 2002 Bill, Domestic violence, for the purposes of this Act was defined as, "any conduct of the respondent shall constitute domestic violence if he (a) habitually assaults or makes the life of the aggrieved person miserable by cruelty of conduct even if such conduct does not amount to physical ill-treatment; etc." --- and there was no one to define what 'habitually' meant. Once a day? Once a week? Once a fortnight?

These amendments, like the Domestic Violence proposals, will need to be significantly changed before they can claim to be of any benefit to Commercial Sex Workers. As they stand right now, although they might so a little good, they are far more likely to a lot of harm.