Social worker Tara Kerkar‘s NGO ‘Savera’ on Monday came out in support of any proposal to regularize prostitution, saying that while those engaged in commercial sex services receive steady financial gains, they continue to remain vulnerable otherwise to exploitation and disease.
Referring to a recent instance where nine women escaped from the protective home for victims rescued from flesh trade, Kerkar said, “It is not possible to rehabilitate those employed in such trade because majority of them do not wish to let go of the employment as it pays well. What is required is regularization of the entire trade in the state so that those employed therein are protected by law.”
She further flayed the then chief minister Manohar Parrikar for cracking down on the red light area in Baina in June 2004. “What Parrikar did in Baina in 2004 was wrong,” Kerkar said. Members of Savera also expressed the need for an infrastructural upgradation of the protective home in Merces while calling for the staff and the counselors to be sensitive towards the women.
“Why do these girls run away? It is because they are not treated as victims, but as accused. They are forced to survive in deplorable conditions. The facility is crumbling down as the eight-member committee including two prominent persons working in this field have been inactive for over 10 years,” Kerkar said, while demanding an inquiry into the functioning of the committee.
Savera said that it has written a letter to the chief minister bringing to his notice the list of problems and shortcomings in the functioning of the protective homes in the state.
Tara Kerkar flayed former CM Manohar Parrikar’s demolition of Baina red-light area calling it “wrong”
