Criminalize or De-criminalize, that is the question!

A group of organizations have launched a campaign against a move by UN Women, a United Nations organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women, to decriminalize pimping, buying sex and brothel-keeping.

“Such a move will fuel huge sex-trafficking as those who buy and sell women will get off scot free,” Ruchira Gupta of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, an anti-sex trafficking NGO, told reporters here today. Apne Aap was founded by twenty-two women from Mumbai’s red light district, with a vision of a world where no woman could be bought or sold.

The Apne Aap petition addressed to the Phumzile Mlambo Ngucak, Executive Director, UN Women said: “We do not want to be called ‘sex workers’ but prostituted women and children, as we can never accept our exploitation as ‘work’. We think that the attempts in UN documents to call us ‘sex workers’ legitimizes violence against women, especially women of discriminated caste, poor men and women, and women and men from minority groups, who are the majority of the prostituted.”

Ruchira Gupta is the Founder and President of Apne Aap Women Worldwide – a grassroots organization in India working to end sex trafficking by increasing choices for at-risk girls and women. She has striven over her 25 year career to highlight the link between trafficking and prostitution laws, and to lobby policy makers to shift blame from victims to perpetrators.

She testified in the United States Senate before the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000, and she lobbied with other activists at the United Nations during the formulations for the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons — resulting in the first UN instrument to address demand for trafficking in Article 9.

In 2009 Gupta won the Clinton Global Citizen Award and in 2007 , she won the Abolitionist Award at the UK House of Lords. In 2008 and 2009, Gupta addressed the UN General Assembly on human trafficking. She won an Emmy in 1997 for her work on the documentary “The Selling of Innocents,” which inspired the creation of Apne Aap. Her work has been featured in 11 books including Half the Sky by Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof.

Prior to founding Apne Aap, Gupta worked in the United Nations in various capacities in 12 countries for over ten years. She is on the board of Coalition against Trafficking in Women and the advisory councils of the Polaris Project, Vital Voices, Ricky Martin Foundation, Asia Society, Nomi Network, The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and Cents for Relief. In 2012 and 2013, she designed and taught courses on human trafficking for New York University’s School of Global Affairs.

The twenty-two women who founded were the subject of Ruchira Gupta’s Emmy award winning documentary, “The Selling of Innocents,” which exposed trafficking of women and girls from Nepal to India. During the production of the film, the women formed a connection with each other that ended their isolation and gave them the strength to resist their situation.

When filming completed, the group continued to meet informally in parks. The respect they received when acting as a group and the strength of their collective bargaining inspired them to create a legal structure to support their vision. Apne Aap registered as an NGO in 2002 in Mumbai, India. Through the efforts of a board member, Apne Aap was given a room in an abandoned municipal school on Falkland Street, the heart of Mumbai’s red light area. This room was a safe place to converse, sleep, repair torn clothes, bathe and receive mail. It was also a place to hold meetings and classes.

In the following years, Apne Aap’s vision and impact grew. Members reached out to other women trapped in prostitution and organized self-empowerment programs in Bihar, Delhi and West Bengal, where Apne Aap is currently working in local communities.

Though all of the twenty-two founding women have since passed away from hunger, suicide, and AIDS-related complications, Apne Aap’s work continues. Self-empowerment groups across the country meet at Apne Aap community centers, safe spaces where women and girls can gather, access education, improve their livelihood options and receive legal rights training. Today, Apne Aap’s work reaches over 15,000 women and girls and continues to work toward making the vision of the founding twenty-two women a reality.

More than 1,000 individuals and organizations representing victims and survivors, women and dalits have signed a petition that the NGO would submit to UN Women in Delhi on January 7.

The petition addressed to Phumzile Mlambo Ngucak, Executive Director of UN Women, said “We think that the attempts in UN documents to call us ‘sex workers‘ legitimizes violence against women, especially women of discriminated caste, poor men and women, and women and men from minority groups, who are the majority of the prostituted.”

Gupta said the UN Women note and the UNAIDS recommendations were in violation of agreed upon protocols and conventions that India and other member states of the UN were party to.

“This back door attempt to push through policies without getting the formal agreement of member states is a dangerous precedent,” she said.

Send in your COMMENTS HERE