Vysok Tatry
Stary Smokovec, 06201
Slovakia
Last updated: October 12, 2010
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By Carl Cardiff
November 29, 2008
On the streets of Kamathipura young women stand ready and available, looking to lure their next customer. They pose, they smile, some wave. They look terribly young, their faces heavy with makeup. Many are dressed in Western clothes, others in traditional saris. In this red light district of Mumbai, they stand on the kerbside in front of grimy shacks containing the beds on which they do their work. There is the hustle and chaos of the traffic, the clogged roads, the constant noise. And there is terrible sadness too.
"I was tricked here. I was in love with a man and I came here with him. But when I got here, he sold me, says Simla, a 42 year old prostitute, originally from Nepal. She has two children and she saves what little she earns to send them to school, desperate that they do not follow her into the sex industry. "I was fooled into this. I will not allow my children to do it."
Sex costs little on the frenetic streets of India's business capital, where people come and go all the time. New arrivals wash up from India's poor rural hinterland, desperate for work, any sort of work. Men who are used to a repressed, conservative culture come and stand and stare. There is a near constant flow. A young woman might be able to charge a customer 100 rupees (1.30) a time, but an older woman might only get 30 rupees (40 pence). When a woman demands that a customer use a condom, the price is usually lowered as a result.
These women and their customers are at the forefront of India's Aids crisis. The country has up to three million people living with HIV, the third highest total in the world. Experts say that the most important danger in the spread of HIV comes from the relatively high numbers of men who go to sex workers, who do not use condoms and whose jobs involve them travelling. As a result, both sex workers and India's legions of horn blaring truck drivers are among the groups most persistently targeted by health workers and educators trying to push the message of safe sex.
Index of articles, click here.
Zephyrus Schroedderr,
Vysok Tatry
Stary Smokovec, 06201
Slovakia
Last updated: October 12, 2010