Kimberly Walters (University of Chicago), under the supervision of Dr. Jennifer Cole, will research how individuals who engage in socially stigmatized work leverage international debates about exploitative labor practices. This proposal examines a group of marginalized women in Hyderabad, India as they attempt to not only secure international development funds but to also negotiate a new role for themselves in the ongoing project of Indian nationalism. Walters' research will explore the development industry's influences on culture change and ways in which recipients of "development" turn such initiatives to their own purposes. Her ethnography will problematize the binary between "empowerment" and "victimization" that has polarized various NGOs and other organizations that work with marginalized women, and question the widespread claim that women remain in these social stigmatized occupations only out of economic coercion, and demonstrate ways in which international rehabilitation efforts are entrenching conservative gender roles in India.
Walters will collect data through (1) ethnographic observations among community-based organizations (CBOs) and at public events in which these workers collectively represent themselves; (2) interviews with both NGO personnel who seek to "empower" women within this work and those who alternatively seek to "rehabilitate" them; with leaders who interface between the development industry and workers; with workers who are the targets of development strategies; and with politicians, police, and judges who control the allotment of social services that Indian citizens require; and (3) written and visual materials through which multinational organizations, NGOs and unions represent themselves to various publics.
The findings of Walters' research will be relevant to public health officials and to the Indian legal system, which is presently considering various legislation related to labor reform of labor practices.
Since the turn of the millennium, the constant deployment of the trope of sex trafficking in transnational film, television, and social media; the ongoing admonitions to fight sex trafficking from public figures like Nicholas Kristof and Demi Moore; the earnest pleas from the sea of NGOs who "rescue sex slaves;" legislation and governmental funding from the U.S. and other governments have woven tight global circuits of humanitarian demand, production, and consumption. As the transnational circulation of trafficking narratives has heightened the urgency of the call to fund rehabilitation efforts, all forms of sex work have increasingly become viewed through the lens of forced prostitution, where little more than a decade ago sex work was primarily addressed in terms of public health concerns about HIV prevention. This changing focus has meant that funding for prostitute rescue and rehabilitation has grown, while funding for sex worker collectivization and empowerment is falling out of favor. The present research found that in response to the heightening global moral panic over sex trafficking, sex workers in Hyderabad, India were being forcibly rescued and rehabilitated by both government and internationally funded non-profit organizations. Stories of being "rescued" by these organizations closely paralleled stories of having been initially trafficked into sex work: themes of being locked up and unable to get word to family members, being verbally and even physically abused by their captors/rescuers, attempting to escape, and the irreparable damage to their family relations interlaced both sets of stories. As sex workers who were forcibly rehabilitated explained, the harsh treatment of local sex workers by rehabilitation workers is not apparent to donor organizations, who are shown only what they hope to see during oversight visits and are not given a chance to freely converse with the inmates of rehabilitation centers. In South India, the rehabilitation approach to addressing commercial sex attempts to return sex workers to the perpetual poverty of legitimate but impossibly underpaid jobs in the regularized labor force. If a woman in Hyderabad, India must support children or other family members who are themselves unable to financially contribute to the family, the monthly total a woman must earn to get by in Hyderabad is more than she can hope for in jobs that are accessible to non-elite women. Factory work, agricultural work, construction work, domestic service, or work as a helper in a hospital, school or shop—none of these jobs pay enough for a woman to support herself and her dependents without other help. But, through three paid sexual encounters a day, a woman can earn four times or more what she would earn in other labor, and the income of some sex workers even places them in the Indian middle-class. Thus, rehabilitating sex workers to socially legitimate jobs is a troubled prospect. The humanitarian response that seeks to "free" sex workers, whom they term "modern-day slaves," by providing them with training for accessible jobs leaves the larger, dismal market in Indian feminine labor unchanged. Ultimately, the apparently humanitarian offer of freedom from "modern-day slavery" is an offer for poor women in South India to accept and return to their "legitimate" lot in transnational class slavery, which leaves them slaves to cycles of debt. At present, the global flows of humanitarian hopes and dollars that northern rescue fantasies elicit are converging in this attempt to return sex workers to "legitimate" labor—that is, bent over in the factories and fields for a global system that pays them too little to support their families, but nevertheless free from "modern-day slavery." The results of this research should give the U.S. Congress as well as many international NGOs pause and reason to reconsider their funding of initiatives that profess to rehabilitate sex workers in developing countries. The present research indicates that in South India, such funding supports extreme and dehumanizing treatment of women who have found it necessary to sell sex. Not only does funding these modes of rehabilitation facilitate human rights violations, it also has no real impact on decreasing the practice of prostitution, since a majority of "rehabilitated" women return to sex work once they are released from rehabilitation centers in Hyderabad, knowing that other jobs won’t pay them enough to get by. Few women in South India would choose sex work over other viable options, but other viable options are scarce. A much more expansive solution to broader economic structures that exploit non-elite female labor must be sought if donor states and organizations hope to bring about any permanent change to the problem of prostitution. At present, these funds are not only not accomplishing their intended goals, but are underwriting the inhumane treatment of South Indian sex workers. Any aid provided should focus on increasing women’s available alternatives, not on eliminating the one that does exist.
