On the evening of 3 March 2009, International Sex Worker Rights Day, over 3000 children of sex workers between the ages of six and 25 marched through College Street in Kolkata. They were demanding both a guarantee of their mothers' right to livelihood as sex workers, as well as their own right, as children, to live free from stigma and discrimination. One of the most popular slogans was against Renuka Chaudhary, then the Women and Child Development Minister of India: 'Renuka chaudhary'r kalo hath guriye dao, guriye dao!' (Smash Renuka Chaudhary's black hand). This provocation came at a time when most of urban India was hailing Chaudhary's tough stand against the high-profile assault by a Hindu rightwing group, the Sri Ram Sene, on women at a Mangalore pub. Yet the children were angry at the proposal by the ministry to amend the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act of 1956 (ITPA), to criminalise clients of sex workers – a move that would have rendered their mothers effectively unemployed. The children were also protesting against an already existing provision in the same law that allows the state to forcibly take away children who were said to be living off their mothers' earnings, living with them after they turned 18. Today, this statute remains on the books.
In the context of trafficking – especially sex trafficking – the focus on children has special prominence in recent years. Documentary films such as the award-winning Born into Brothels (2004) and The Selling of Innocents (1996) have highlighted images of acute vulnerability and suffering. At the same time, these have also proposed a straightjacketed response to 'saving' these children: raid the brothels, and rescue and rehabilitate the children found there. The subtext to this approach is that these children's own cultures, communities or mothers cannot or will not lead to their betterment. Popular representations have thus led to a widespread perception that such children live abandoned lives in 'hellholes', and that the only way to protect them from such 'evil' is to remove them from the situation entirely. Yet civil-society interventions seldom create enabling conditions for these children to enjoy guarantees of child rights, or the opportunity to have any respect for their mothers' livelihoods. Most known civil society interventions' primary concern is first to 'rescue' the children out of the brothels and then train them into civilisation through education.
Further, while the truth about the plight and vulnerability of children of sex workers cannot be denied, it is not the whole truth. These children are indeed at the receiving end of disadvantage – due to where they live, their mothers' professions, and the burden of their age; at the same time, they are also active in resisting such disadvantages on a daily basis, which are exemplary shows of resilience. Indeed, their age not only results in violation of these children's rights in the first place, particularly because of their circumstances, but is also why compassionate interventions do not consider them as citizens whose say matters. In turn, this tends to disconnect the question of rights from politics when it comes to claiming the human rights of children of sex workers.
Coming together
In 2005, the same year in which Born into Brothels won the Oscar in the US, the children of sex workers in Kolkata's Sonagachhi area started to organise. In this, they drew inspiration from the work that their mothers had been doing with the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a sex-worker collective with over 60,000 members. They called themselves Amra Padatik, meaning 'We are foot-soldiers', and stated, 'Our goal is to establish the rights and dignity of all marginalised people and their children through social and political changes. With our involvement in this global movement, we are determined to improve the quality of life and social status of the sex workers' and their children.'