‘Let’s demystify prostitution’

[sam]

‘Let’s demystify prostitution’
http://www.dnaindia. com/report.asp?newsid=1099522

Fouzia visited the red light area in Lahore for eight years before she penned her book ‘Taboo’

Pakistani author and social activist Fouzia Saeed vividly remembers an incident where a couple of young men on the streets of Lahore followed her from her hotel room to her car. “A woman, who is unaccompanied by a man, is considered to be amoral in Pakistan. What these people were trying to do was to ascertain whether they were right about me or not,” says Saeed.

“If those men had followed me further, their suspicions would have been confirmed as I drove straight to Shahi Mohalla, a red light area in Lahore,” says the social activist, who spent nearly eight years in the dinghy bylanes of Shahi Mohalla, meeting prostitutes, pimps and customers to collate material for her book ‘Taboo - The Hidden Culture of a Red Light area.’ “For the first time in my life I was not angry at being considered a loose woman. The concept of morality as defined by my culture has been long shattered, to be replaced by a sense of understanding for women who are used and abused by the very people who call them names,” she says.

Fouzia, who has a PhD in Education from the University of Minnesota, has spent her life as an activist and researcher on women’s issues in Pakistan. She has the distinction of founding ‘Bedar’ (which means ‘aware’ in Urdu), the first non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Pakistan that provides services to victims of rape and domestic violence.

Currently in Mumbai under the auspices of the Mumbai Karachi Forum, Fouzia also loves to perform traditional Pakistani folk dances. The taboos placed on women, who dance in public and the insinuation that “women artistes are nothing but prostitutes” led her to explore why her society denigrates women whenever they wish to express themselves publicly. “I kept going back to Shahi MohalIa for about eight months before finally deciding to write the book. I had questions about the performing arts in relation to prostitution and about the stigmatisation of women who perform in public,” she says.

Published in September 2001 in English, the book has been translated in Urdu, Hindi and more recently in Marathi. “It is a risky subject and I was prepared for a backlash by fundamentalists in my country. But the book came out around September 11, and everybody got so absorbed with the World Trade Centre carnage that it gave the book a chance to take root in public consciousness.”

Fouzia insists that one of her goals is to demystify prostitution. “Unless we understand this phenomenon we cannot come up with a solution. We’ve got to move our attention from them to us because the problem may exist within us.” She points out that it was the male powerful elite in the subcontinent that created Kanjar, the caste that takes up prostitution as an occupation, for their own entertainment.

“On the flip side, they also created the modest woman and the good wife. So my analysis took me in a direction where I started understanding this good-woman, bad-woman idea,” says the author who has now learnt that to bring about change in a society one needn’t always be confrontational. “There are many other healthy ways of doing it and I am exploring all of them,” she adds.

[Andrew]

"male powerful elite... that created Kanjar"
That is the kind of power no one needs to have.
Good article; I look forward to finding the book.