A disturbing new study recently went viral on Indian media outlets. Authored by scientists at Harvard Medical School and Yale University, it claims that shutting down red light areas in Mumbai, New Delhi, Nagpur, Kolkata and Pune during the lockdown can reduce the number of new COVID-19 cases by 72%, and recommends keeping them closed indefinitely. One of the study’s authors, Sudhakar Nuti, later suggested that sex workers should be linked to government schemes and channelled into other occupations in order to ameliorate the effects. He seemed to see the recommendations as permanent measures to eradicate both the virus and sex work. COVID-19, he said, presents “an ideal natural opportunity to help sex workers exit their trade and find alternative livelihoods.”
While the full study has not been released yet for public review, this recommendation is based upon a flawed and dangerously simplistic understanding of where and how sex work occurs in India. With little or no consultation from sex worker collectives, activists, or academics, it recommends measures that will increase police violence and precarity for not only sex workers but millions of informal sector labourers and migrants across the country.
It is fantasy to suggest that there are clearly demarcated red-light areas of contagion that can be contained by dramatic control measures. The truth is that only a very small percentage of sex work in India work takes place in brothels. A study of 5301 sex workers across Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra showed that only 24% of respondents had ever worked in a brothel. Other studies have confirmed that the vast majority of sex workers are street and home-based. Even for those who work in brothels it is rarely one or the other. Svati Shah, an anthropologist who has documented sex work in Mumbai for over a decade, found that many brothel-based sex workers have also worked on streets and at construction sites where they sometimes trade sex for the opportunity to work. They are also mobile. Most sex workers in India are either internal or foreign migrants, and as such they move frequently between different cities and their hometowns, relying on shifting networks of relatives, NGOs, state agencies, and other precarious city dwellers to keep afloat.
