Good girls don't
Sohaila Abdulali
This is an excerpt from the chapter “Good girls don’t”, from the book “What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape” by Sohaila Abdulali. Writing from the viewpoint of a survivor, writer, daughter, mother, counsellor and activist, Sohaila Abdulali not only looks at what we – women, men, trans people, politicians, teachers, writers, sex workers, feminists, sages, mansplainers, victims and families – think about rape but also questions common assumptions about victimhood.
Kiran wore a rather fabulous sparkly green blouse on the day we spent together. She took me to Gokulnagar, where she and other sex workers live and work in colourful houses set in a row backing on to an undeveloped parcel of land. It was a peaceful morning scene, with kids running around, smells of cooking and washing, women clustered around a sleeping newborn baby. The baby was so cute I pulled out my camera to take a picture, only to be smacked down. It’s bad luck to take pictures of babies with their eyes closed.
Kiran is from a high-caste Hindu family in a village far away from here. Her birth family is political, connected, and influential. Her brother was the local sarpanch, head of the panchayat, the village government. He was embroiled in a political dispute, and his rivals caught Kiran, fifteen at the time, put her in a car, took her into the jungle, and raped her.
They raped her, kicked her, urinated on her: “It was very bad, very bad.” She still has scars on her back where thorns pierced her flesh. They left her there and roared off. She picked herself up and knew that if she went back home she would either be murdered or driven to suicide by her family.
Certainly nobody would ever want to marry her. She never went home. She walked in the other direction. Now she does sex work for a living. Her children are grown and doing well. She has several lovers and is content with her life. She takes no nonsense from anyone.
The sex workers in her town get very indignant at those who would either pity them or “save” them. When I was in Gokulnagar, a government car drove up with two men in it. One was a police officer and one a court official. They were looking for information about a sex worker they had detained a few weeks ago, alerted by a tip from the Freedom Firm, an anti-slavery group that, supported by religious Americans, likes to “rescue” women, lock them up, take away their children, and generally turn a blind eye to any nuances that distinguish between actual trafficking and sex work out of choice.
Trafficking involves lies, coercion, the buying and selling of others—for sex or a variety of other things. Sex work is choosing to sell sex for money as the best option available to you.
Melissa Ditmore has researched human trafficking in many countries, and is an expert in this distinction. “Human trafficking,” she told me, “inherently involves force, fraud, or coercion in any labor sector, and has been documented in fisheries, agriculture, domestic work, and many other labor sectors. Trafficking victims include people of all ages and genders. Sex work is foremost an income-generating activity, in which money is paid for sexual services such as prostitution, stripping, and pornography. Sex workers negotiate what they will do, what it will cost, and decline to work with people they do not want to interact with. Trafficked persons in the sex trades typically do not have these options, but many people trafficked into prostitution return to sex work when they have escaped trafficking situations, because sex work may earn more than other options open to them.
Equating all sex work with rape does nobody any favours.
“When sex work is conflated with trafficking, few victims are helped because jobs in which trafficking is common are neglected when anti-trafficking efforts focus on the sex trades. Sex workers suffer the brunt of police raids, but trafficked women in the sex trades have told me about being arrested as many as ten times without being recognised as trafficking victims by law enforcement.
“Minors are not believed to be able to consent to participation in the sex trades … all instances of prostitution by someone under eighteen years of age are defined as trafficking.”
“Anti-slavery” organisations set out to rescue trafficked and sexually exploited minors, but, lacking nuance and basic respect, they often “rescue” adult sex workers, separate them from their children, and put them in situations of greater vulnerability by cutting off their livelihoods and bringing them under the jurisdiction of the police. Their missionary zeal consists of a thin veneer of righteousness covering a seething disdain for women. Their “rescues” too often leave out the real victims of trafficking. Equating all sex work with rape does nobody any favours.
Sangeeta asked, “Who makes the laws? Did anybody ask us? They call us bechaare (pathetic). Why don’t they look after the ones who really are bechaare?”
Sangeeta is a second-generation sex worker. She would have liked to do something else, but she couldn’t finish school because of the abuse she got for being a sex worker’s daughter. Her teacher threatened to burn her alive, and she left school and became a sex worker at twelve. She lives with her children and sister. She talked about feeling safe working out of her upstairs room, rather than visiting clients. “If a client calls me somewhere else, and suddenly four or five men appear, that’s rape. Jaan bhi to bachaani hai. I have to save my life.” This has happened to her. Now that she’s part of SANGRAM’s sisterhood, however, she and her fellow sex workers look out for each other. They even got together and stopped a man who used to constantly harass them. “He used to curse, spit, kick the women in passing. We tied him up, put chilli powder in his eyes, and beat him soundly. No more harassment.”
These women aren’t “good” by society’s standards, but they are powerful. Maybe that’s part of what makes them scary.
Indian wives are supposed to enter marriage as innocent virgins. They exist for men’s pleasure, not their own. I heard the story of one woman who got carried away while having sex with her husband. In her excitement and passion, she got on top of him. He left her the next day, saying that her enjoyment of sex showed she was experienced and “spoiled.”
These women aren’t ‘good’ by society’s standards, but they are powerful. Maybe that’s part of what makes them scary.
Maybe acknowledging that all sorts of women get raped by all sorts of men messes too much with the comfortable narrative, the narrative that says only good girls get raped. Oh, but it also says good girls don’t get raped. Both these things can’t be true, and sex workers aren’t good girls, so how can they be raped, and if they’re raped, they’re human and hurt, and we can’t have that, so let’s just shut our eyes and maybe the whole confusing thing will go away.
What makes a “good” girl? Too often, being good means being docile, passive, accepting your lot without question.
I hope, in that case, for a new generation of only bad girls, who listen to themselves and follow their own hearts. And get up and straddle their lovers with abandon.
The rural sex workers I met are not typical. They are organised. Sex workers the world over put up with tremendous abuse, oppression and exploitation. These women and men have also endured oppression that could easily crush any human being. Child marriage, constant beatings, violence and put-downs, and nobody, including yourself, with any faith that you might be a human being of worth and value. They have survived all this, and somehow, by coming together, they have come to believe in their own worth and value. They have even managed something that is all too rare among much more privileged women: having some power and agency around sex.
Meena put it well: “We have notions of patriarchy that are set in gold and stone. The sex workers have kicked the ass of these notions.”
I hope, in that case, for a new generation of only bad girls, who listen to themselves and follow their own hearts.
When you can take or leave lovers at will, when you can say no to sex because the man who is paying you refuses to put on a condom, when you know that if someone gets too rough you can beat on the wall and half a dozen women will come to your aid, when you can demand pleasure for yourself, you have more sexual agency than many a married woman living in luxury. It’s counter-intuitive but true: women at the very bottom of society, the truly reviled and crushed, have somehow managed to carve out a breathing space for themselves that includes sexual liberation, despite their continuing vulnerability to rape. They are not the ones who have to pay the going rate to sex workers to get sexual satisfaction. They don’t have to hide their lusts and fantasies.
They don’t have to be “good”.
But they—like convent girls, like women who go out to nightclubs, like grandmothers in Nairobi, like trans people staying out of the glare of streetlights—are trapped by the same narrative, the narrative that refuses to acknowledge that, no matter who you are, if someone forces you to have sex, it is rape. The narrative that says: good girls don’t get raped; bad girls can’t get raped. In either case, the nuns’ infamous Boys are off the hook. We’ve created a narrative that says that either it didn’t happen to you, or you deserved it.