Mumbai bank offers sex workers hope
Sita has been staying for over 30 years
in Mumbai's red-light district of Kamathipura, resigned
not only to her own fate but that of her daughter's too.
"But," she says, "if I can do something for my
grandchild, maybe it's still worth it".
20-8-2008
Sex workers in Gujarat village say no to flesh trade
A silent revolution is
sweeping through the dusty terrain of this village,
barely 70 km from the India-Pakistan border in
Banaskantha district. More than 80% of the women here
are saying no to their age-old family tradition - flesh
trade. 20-8-2008
10 Mumbai bar girls held for nude dances in Delhi
Suresh Kumar, who
organised nude dance shows for his customers in the
capital for seven months, ran out of his luck when the
police arrested 10 semi-nude bar dancers and nine of his
clients from a hotel, officials said recently.
20-8-2008
Three booked for rape, shooting porn movie of 19-yr-old in India
After booking a local
youth, his mother and his friend in a rape case, the
Basti Jodhewal police have started investigations.
Maninder Singh allegedly molested a girl on the pretext
of marrying her and made a pornographic film on her.
7-3-2008
Indian sex workers protest against raids
A group of sex workers, supported by an
NGO, moved in a procession to the office of the police
commissioner in Ahmedabad on Saturday to submit a
representation against police brutality.
7-3-2008
Male sex workers worry AIDS campaigners
With the number of male sex workers said
to be rising in the city, AIDS awareness activists are
concerned that these men are not as aware of HIV-related
risks as their female counterparts.
29-2-2008
Nepal's returned HIV positive women face sad plight
In dusty Raxaul south of Kathmandu, on a
pale, cold winter´s morning the plight of a young Nepali
woman being trafficked to India for the commercial sex
sector is just beginning to unfurl. Sarswoti, from
Dhading district bordering Nepal´s capital, Kathamndu,
has been brought here promised of a lucrative job by
Tirtha Ram a middleman, who actually is her first
cousin. 22-2-2008
Pills force early adulthood on minors in brothels in India
Police deny knowledge
of the practice, term it 'a shocking trend' "I hate
looking at my body. My chest and hips have swelled in
the last year," says 14-year-old Mina (name changed).
Like hundreds of minors in the city of Mumbai every
year, Mina was rescued from the clutches of pimps in
Bhiwandi, near Thane, last year.
22-2-2008
India: Sex and the city youth
While
love was on top of the minds of many a young Mumbaikar
on Valentine's Day on Thursday, a recent study showed
that young people in urban Maharashtra are groping in
the dark when it comes to issues relating to sex and
reproductive health. City doctors and researchers added
that they worry about the risky sexual practices by this
age group. 15-2-2008
India: Let boys marry at 18
Flying
in the face of the trend among most youth these days to
marry late, the Law Commission proposed Wednesday to
lower the legal age for marrying to 18 for boys - the
same as for girls. 15-2-2008
Outsourcing wombs in India
In a new
twist to the outsourcing for which India has become
renowned, poor Indian women are renting out their wombs
to foreigners. Surrogate motherhood once was limited in
India to helping close relatives who couldn't complete a
pregnancy due to medical difficulties.
14-11-2007
Punjabi women being lured into prostitution overseas
Punjab may be
moving ahead with legislation to stop travel agents from
cheating youth with the lure of foreign pastures, but
such touts are now baiting young girls into the
multibillion immigration racket.
3-11-2007
Gay sex workers play Russian roulette with HIV in South Asia
Shujaat plies his trade
well. As dusk falls on the Pir Wadhai bus station in the
Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, the slender 19-year-old
gauges disembarking passengers for that 'look' - a
responsive glance or wink suggesting a desire for more
than just a quick bus ride home.
3-11-2007
Bahrain: Final operation for sex change
A woman fighting for the right to be
legally recognised as a man will travel to Thailand in
December for her final sex change operation. She now
expects to win her legal battle after a medical report
concluded that she is neither male nor female.
2-10-2007
Stamping out sexual harassment in Pakistan
The issue of sexual harassment in the
workplace may be new for many people in this country or
may not even be an issue for them, but anecdotal
evidence would suggest that its frequency is increasing
as a greater number of women enter the workplace.
2-10-2007
Conman dupes 50 women into sex and marriage by posing as UK-based Indian
engineer
A
conman duped 50 women into sex and marriage after posing
as a UK-based Indian looking for a bride. Liaquat Ali
Khan, 32, met the women through an online matrimonial
site where he pretended to be a wealthy British Asian
engineer and used fictitious names.
26-9-2007
Indian porn racket: Man lured girls from websites
A Chennai-based man, Liaqat Ali, who was
arrested on Tuesday by the Chennai police on charges of
cheating, is now facing more serious allegations. Liaqat
had allegedly duped around 40 girls from across the
country by posing as an IAS officer looking for an
alliance - he had even married four girls.
26-9-2007
New law to target sex workers' clients in India
Government is set to amend the Immoral
Traffic Prevention Act to bring clients under its ambit,
rendering them liable to imprisonment upto six months
and a fine extending upto Rs 50,000.
13-9-2007
Inhospitable reception in Pakistan
Conversing with Charlotte is always a
pleasure. She's original and witty; each encounter with
her is memorable - regrettably, the last one for all the
wrong reasons. She told me some stories about her visits
to Pakistan that left me uneasy, even embarrassed.
13-9-2007
Indian court bans nude actress photos
India's Supreme Court barred the media on
Friday from showing nude photographs of a former
Bollywood actress, said to have been taken by a camera
hidden in the bathroom of the jail where she was
imprisoned over a forgery case.
30-8-2007
Rich, unfaithful men spur AIDS in Asia
Contrary to the widely-held belief that
HIV/AIDS is fuelled by poverty, a surprising and
authoritative new study reveals that the epidemic in
Asia is being driven by wealthy men, often after having
unprotected sex with prostitutes.
30-8-2007
Disposable commodity? The shame of female infanticide
I was told that the day I was born, the
midwife blurted out - "Oh No it's a girl. Now I won't
get the same amount in baksheesh (tip) as I would have,
had this been a boy." My irate grandmother not only gave
her much more than what she would have ever got for the
birth of a boy, my grandparents threw a grand party in
celebration to welcome my arrival.
30-8-2007
Refused sex, HIV+ man poisons wife
An HIV positive man has been arrested by
the Dahisar police for allegedly poisoning his wife. The
26-year-old woman, who is fighting for her life in a
hospital, had refused to have sex with him.
22-8-2007
Canadian pornographer held in Tamil Nadu
A Canadian tourist
visiting Mahabaliburam in Tamil Nadu has been arrested for allegedly
indulging in sodomy and pornography, exploiting poor men.
22-8-2007
India: Help at hand for sexual minorities
Christy Raj would have been stripped if
'she' had not jumped off a running bus. But curious men
felt offended as Raj, a female-to-male transgender,
dressed up as a man and claimed to be one as well.
8-8-2007
A new saviour for sex workers in India
We love to hate them. We love to call
them by names. But how many of us bother to look into
the plight of their lives? Virtually none. So what!
There are people from the sex workers' fraternity, who
have now decided to work for the uplift of city sex
workers. 28-7-2007
Same-sex marriage case: Transsexual Shumail Raj freed on bail
Shumail Raj, a
transsexual who is the centre of same-sex marriage and
is sentenced for perjury, was released on bail from the
Kot Lakhpat jail this week. The prison authorities let
Shumail leave with his mother and brother and the family
immediately left for Faisalabad.
28-7-2007
Iran: Sex and the mad Mullahs
The
ordinary Iranian is not insane. It's the political
leaders in Tehran who are nuts. I have proof. Of both.
Over the past few years, I've taught English to quite a
number of new Canadians from Iran. They were all
determined to learn English as fast as possible, get
jobs in their chosen fields and find out as much as they
could about sexual habits prohibited by the Mullahs.
15-7-2007
India: 'Ban sale of sex toys'
Saying that the sale of sex toys in India
would have "severe consequences in society", a Madhya
Pradesh minister has urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
to convene an all-party meeting to discuss the issue.
1-7-2007
Indian children getting addicted to porn
Easy access to pornographic sites in
cyber cafes and the availability of dish television
services from Myanmar offering adult content have led to
an addiction to pornography among children in Mizoram.
But the state government is yet to wake up to the grave
issue. 1-7-2007
Bail for 'same-sex' couple in Pakistan; Supreme Court suspends jail sentence
The
Supreme Court on Thursday granted bail to a 'same-sex'
couple and suspended a verdict handed down by the Lahore
High Court. The high court had declared the marriage
un-Islamic and sentenced the two to three years in jail.
1-7-2007
Pakistan tops list of 'sex surfers'
Surfers in Pakistan search more for 'sex'
on Google than in any other country while those in the
Indian capital top the list of those hunting for the
three-letter word on the Internet.
1-7-2007
India: Friends with benefits
In a
recent study of interpersonal characteristics, Patrick
Markey, a psychologist at Villanova University and his
wife Charlotte Markey, a psychologist at Rutgers
University, found that that people may be getting
physical more as an expression of their warmth towards
others and not for mere pleasure. Experts feel the
research finding is an indicator of the direction
relationships seem to be taking, with sex now being one
way to show that you care.
18-6-2007
India: Transvestite dancers endure rape and sadism
To earn a living, Kiran dresses up in
women's clothes, dances at wedding parties in
countryside and tries not to struggle when he is raped
at knifepoint by drunken male wedding guests.
18-6-2007
New film focuses on prostitution as family trade in India
A new film will
examine a centuries-old tradition among some
underprivileged Indian communities where girls in the
family become prostitutes, with their brothers and
fathers acting as pimps.
18-6-2007
Sexual aversion a ground for divorce in India
Holding that sexual incompatibility or
denial of sex by either spouse was sufficient ground to
seek divorce, Delhi High Court has recently annulled a
13-year-old marriage after both the sides agreed to
dissolve the relationship.
18-6-2007
Soft porn movies on the rise in Karnataka
The box office success of
Shakeela-starrer sleazy movie Sixteen to Sixty has
started a new trend in the Kannada film industry, and
more and more soft porn movies are queuing up for
release. 18-6-2007
Bar girls: Women a target again?
The bar girls don't seem to be getting
any respite from society. After being snatched off their
only means of livelihood, the girls were evicted from
their rented flats and homes in Thane's Kisan Nagar
area, this week. The girls were evicted for alleged
indecent behaviour. But who's indecent behaviour? The
residents who beat them up while evicting them or the
client, most of whom have a family, who visit them for
favours? 8-6-2007
India struggles to combat the trafficking of poor women into forced
prostitution
Meena
discovered she had been sold by her boss while riding in
an auto-rickshaw headed to New Delhi's red-light
district. The 12-year-old was working as a domestic
servant in Calcutta when the homeowner told her about a
good-paying job at his sister's house in India's
capital. 8-6-2007
Afghans exposed to web of porn
At
the Internet cafes popping up around this once
culturally oppressed city, the computer cubicles usually
have little doors that Web surfers can shut behind them.
8-6-2007
Afghanistan: War, poverty and ignorance fuels sexual abuse of children
Abdul Kabir, not
his real name, left his home in Afghanistan's southern
Urozgan province to work for a relative and attend
school in neighbouring Kandahar province. Six months
later, the 12-year-old found himself in a juvenile
prison after being sexually abused.
8-6-2007
Lahore judge jails same-sex couple
The recent discovery of the same sex
female couple in Pakistan, unprecedented in the
country's history and taken with shock by the public,
has raised many moral, cultural, religious and legal
questions which are not easy to be addressed by the
court of law. 28-5-2007
India: "A country of housemaids"
It
has taken years of gruesome cases of sexual torture and
molestation for the Indian government to come up with a
set of norms to protect the interests of female domestic
workers. 28-5-2007
India tackles sex trafficking with 'maid ban'
India will ban women under 30 from
emigrating to work as domestic help in the Gulf and
parts of Africa and Southeast Asia in a bid to curb sex
trafficking, a report said this week.
21-5-2007
Lets talk about sex, says UNAIDS
UNAIDS country director Dr Denis Broun
has a tough task on his hand. He has to convince at
least three state governments not to ban sex education
to control the spread of HIV.
21-5-2007
Over 35% girls enter prostitution before 18 years
Of 2.8 million
prostitutes in the country, 35.47% entered the trade
before the age of 18 years, Minister of state for Women
and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury informed the
Rajya Sabha Monday. 16-5-2007
Sex education creates storm in AIDS-stricken India
Moves to bring sex out
of the closet in largely conservative India have kicked
up a morality debate between educators who say sex
education will reduce HIV rates, and critics who fear it
will corrupt young minds.
16-5-2007
Pakistani women against jailing husbands
Pakistani women activists and MPs believe
a new bill stipulating jail terms for husbands over
verbally, psychologically or sexually abuses of wives
would have a devastating impact on the family
institution and would send divorce rates sky-high.
12-5-2007
India: Nude vs nudity, what's art?
India's art fraternity up in arms against
the arrest of two art students in Vadodara, accused by
the saffron brigade of making offensive paintings.
12-5-2007
Nepal: Impoverished Nepalese girls tricked into prostitution
For the past
three years, 25-year-old Sita Maskey has been fighting a
court battle in the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu, to
punish alleged trafficker Rekha Karki, whom she says
tricked her into forced prostitution in Dubai, in the
United Arab Emirates.
12-5-2007
Women's separatist group opposes sex education in Kashmir
The women's
separatist outfit, Dukhtaran-e-Milat (DeM) Monday
opposed introduction of sex education in Kashmir schools
despite officials having no such plans.
12-5-2007
Lahore sex workers despondent over risk of contracting HIV
With nobody willing to
help her escape, 28-year-old Rubina is confined to life
as a sex worker in Lahore's centuries-old Heera Mandi -
widely deemed to be the largest red-light district in
Pakistan, if not the entire subcontinent.
1-5-2007
Married couples shying away from sex worrying, says sexologist
Unconsummated
marriages or married couples living without any sexual
intercourse, may sound peculiar but it is a prevalent
phenomenon in India, even in recent times.
1-5-2007
Colombo banks to combat child porn on the net
Sri Lanka's banking community, in a
campaign initiated by the Standard Chartered Bank (SCB),
has set up a Task Force in the war against child
pornography on the Internet, the SCB said.
1-5-2007
Orissa debates sex education in schools
After Maharashtra and Kerala, it is the
turn of Orissa now to debate the touchy issue of sex
education in schools. 1-5-2007
Indian sex workers engage men to disguise operations
Sex workers in
Surat are employing men to act as their partners to
cover up tracks of their flesh trade. In some cases, sex
workers have even turned to social and emotional support
from these 'companions' and transferred property in
their name. 25-4-2007
India: Five expelled from college for their role in film on gays
Five students have been
expelled from a college in Kerala for associating with a
film on homosexuals. 25-4-2007
Inda: Ex-husband forces wife into prostitution, porn
A young woman has
accused her ex-husband and her brother-in-law of raping
her, taking her nude photographs and forcing her into
flesh trade. 25-4-2007
Porn websites show disrespect to the Indian Tricolour
While seeking
permission from the court to allow public to hoist the
Tricolour, industrialist-cum-politician Navin Jindal may
have not pondered that his endeavour could also
facilitate its misuse.
21-4-2007
India: Sex, work and pleasure
Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC),
Asia's largest sex workers' collective, has sparked off
a debate by demanding that sex work be treated as
entertainment work. 14-4-2007
Desi immigrants in US: 'No sex before marriage'
Young Indian immigrants to the United
States keep their cultural beliefs about no sex before
marriage but the second generation shows signs of
acquiring local customs, according to a new survey.
14-4-2007
Half of Indian children face sexual abuse
One in five of children in India are
physically abused while more than half have faced some
form of sexual abuse, a UNICEF backed government study
has revealed. 14-4-2007
India: Buffalo: $350. Child: $12
It
is cheaper to buy a child than a buffalo in India,
according to activists who marched on a summit of South
Asian nations in Delhi yesterday to protest against
human trafficking. 6-4-2007
Pakistan: Irate wife has husband arrested for watching porn
A woman registered an
FIR against her husband for watching blue films in the
presence of the family and for smoking hashish at home.
A case was registered at the Taimuria police station.
6-4-2007
Indian government will pay for female babies to stop sex-selection abortions
The
government is India is unveiling yet another proposal to
try to stem the tide of sex-selection abortions and
female infanticides there. The Asian nation, where
cultural values place more emphasis on boys, has had a
hard time stopping the practices and the skewed
male-female gender ratios they produce.
16-3-2007
India's Sex workers' meet ends with demand for new identity
Are sex workers
'entertainment workers'? At the end of a seven-day
all-India conference of sex workers, this is what women
who refuse to accept old tags are asking.
8-3-2007
Delhi sex workers oppose legalisation of prostitution
Amidst the din
of the celebration of International Women's Day on
Thursday, sex workers in the capital yesterday opposed
legalising their profession, saying it will spell
disaster for the society.
8-3-2007
Sex education in Kerala raises eyebrows
In the highly literate state of Kerala,
sex education still seems to be a taboo. But the
Marxist-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) government is
determined to go ahead with the move to introduce a
handbook on sex education for students of standard IX
and XI despite criticism it was nothing but mere
pornography. 24-2-2007
For UK couple, this trip could get them their second Indian baby
Fed up of bureaucratic
hurdles to adoption back home, Wendy and Brian Duncan
are back in Mumbai to try embryo donation again.
24-2-2007
Lifestyle changes affecting sexual life in India
Coinciding with the out-sourcing and
Information Technology boom, India is reporting more
sexual disorders, divorces and extra-marital affairs,
according to some leading sexologists.
24-2-2007
India gets tough on sex determination tests
Faced with a declining sex ratio, the
Madhya Pradesh government has directed that cases
against sonography centres - misused by people who want
sons - can now be directly registered in courts.
14-2-2007
Nepal: Sold into prostitution for $680
"My aunt lured me with tall promises of
finding work in Kathmandu. But I ended up in a brothel
in Pune," Sunita* broke into tears recalling the old
wounds of the past. "I'm totally perplexed. No way for
me to return anywhere," she said. "My aunt has ruined me
completely." 4-2-2007
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