Prostitution is as old as the mountains and is known as the oldest profession in the world. In India and all other third world countries, people will have sex with prostitutes. Like all countries in the world, prostitution in India is a controversial issue. Prostitution or the exchange of sex for money is legal, but related activities such as solicitation of sex, brothel operation, and pimping are illegal.
The Hindu culture is by far the largest religious group in India. This belief reinforces cultural notions of honor, shame, purity, and pollution. In this society, adolescent girls are expected to keep their virginity or safeguard their ‘purity’ until marriage. Regardless of her religion, when a woman engages in prostitution, she, her children and even the place where she lives are forever ‘contaminated’. Those who are sold for sex are rejected.
The law in Bangladesh allows unemployed women over the age of eighteen to apply for work as prostitutes. Daulatdia is a sprawling brothel and the largest in Bangladesh. It is a sex slum and has been described as a ‘den of vice and violence’ and people go there to have sex with prostitutes. It is a community of two thousand shacks with each one housing a prostitute. The women here serve thousands of men a day for about two bucks a trick. In a country where sixty million people live on less than a dollar a day, many women see prostitution as an economic necessity.
The entire economy of Daulatdia is based on the sale of sex. Although women are considered impure here, Daulatdia has its own internal class system. At the bottom of the pile are the chukri. They are young women who have been sold to a lady at a young age as sex slaves. At the top of the class system are the ladies. They are usually retired prostitutes who own the chukris and one-room shacks the girls rent to sell sex. In the middle are the independent prostitutes. On a busy day, they will see up to ten clients and are lucky to earn twenty to thirty dollars a day.
Child trafficking is the buying and selling of children for sexual purposes and is rife in brothels in India and Bangladesh. Child prostitution is widespread with large numbers of girls under the age of eighteen. A third of the women in brothels in third world countries enter as children. They are sold or kidnapped and sold, so they had no choice but to be in these brothels.
Violence is understood to be an occupational hazard for prostitutes not only in third world countries but throughout the world. However, in a third world country, a sex worker is not in a position to negotiate with a client. Sexually transmitted diseases go with the territory with syphilis cases in brothels in India and Bangladesh reaching forty percent. The reason is that many clients refuse to use condoms, yet for a sex worker using a condom means the difference between life and death.
Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) education of prostitutes in these countries can reduce sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) by up to fifty percent. These programs involve the independent prostitutes themselves who share their experiences and teach the younger women things they need to know to survive. They do not receive much in payment for this service but most of the time the prostitutes do it because it is good for their self-esteem. In places like India and Bangladesh, although legal, prostitutes are still and always will be treated as outcasts.