Sex workers in West Bengal, Delhi, Chandigarh have no other source of income.
AB Wire
A new study conducted by National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) revealed that girls in Delhi who become prostitutes enter the sex industry at age 14 and continue to work in the industry full-time.
The study showed that Delhi sex workers are solely dependent on the revenue from their trade. Most of the sex workers elsewhere in the country are employed as maid servants or laborers.
The National Integrated Biological and Behavioral Surveillance 2014-2015 report of NACO covered 27007 female sex workers across 73 places in 28 states and their response rate was 92 percent. Their average age across most states is between 28 and 30 and the national average is 30 years.
About two third of FSWs at the national level were literate. Two thirds of them were currently married, one-fifth was separated, divorced or widowed and the remaining were unmarried.
The average age at first sexual intercourse among sex workers is 18 years while median age at initiation of commercial sex work is 22 years at the national level. The median duration of sex work is six years nationally and ranged between 3 and 13 years across states.
The sex workers in West Bengal, Delhi and Chandigarh have no other source of income than the trade. But in states like Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Manipur, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, they earn from other professions also. Five percent of them are either working as bar dancers or massagers in beauty parlors.
The most frequently reported primary place of solicitation is home (33%), followed by rented room (20%), public places (16%), lodge / hotels (11%) and brothels (10%). In all states, the predominant place of solicitation is home or rented room.
A recent study conducted by Center for Civil Society has found that the monthly income of a young sex worker in Delhi is between $145 and $217 a month. An older one earns between $87 and $145.
The estimated size of female sex workers in India is around $0.86 million. India also has one of the world’s largest and most robust HIV surveillance systems.
2 Comments
The headline of this article and the figures reported here are completely unsupported by the study quoted. The NACO study (found here: http://www.aidsdatahub.org/sites/default/files/highlight-reference/document/India_IBBS_report_2014-15.pdf) clearly shows on p. 36 that the median age of first commercial sexual intercourse reported among the FSW population being surveyed was 20 and only 0.6% entered at age 14 or younger.
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