Candle-lit vigil in Kolkata on International Sex Workers Rights Day. Reporter#7585286/Demotix. All Rights Reserved.
The protective home in Mumbai is housed in a walled compound with a heavily guarded iron gate. A second set of gates leads to the building. Inside, the women’s living quarters are beyond a third set of locked metal grill doors. The women usually stand behind these doors, asking staff or visitors like myself, police personnel or NGO representatives when they would be released. Legal aid is rarely provided to answer their queries. Their release by the carceral apparatus of a state that takes them into custody to ‘protect’ them from the sex trade remains mired in the unremitting uncertainty of processual delays marking law in practice.
