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Bar girls back home - to prostitution and HIV
By Syed Zarir Hussain
May 15, 2005
Until a month ago, Rani was a much sought after bar dancer in Mumbai -
entertaining crowds with jigs and jives.
The 23-year-old attractive girl from a middleclass family in Assam had been a
hit in the bar circuit ever since she landed in Mumbai three years ago.
Her promoters changed her real name - she was re-christened Rani as she
virtually ruled the dancing floor in one of the plush Mumbai bars.
But with the Maharashtra police launching a crackdown on dance bars recently,
Rani along with a dozen other Assamese girls fled Mumbai and came back to
Assam.
Back home, Rani and her friends found life hard without money coming their way
and were forced into becoming call girls from bar dancers.
Life has changed in other ways too. Rani has found out that she is HIV
positive.
After being told she had tested HIV positive, Rani is today totally shattered.
"I don't know what will happen to me now," Rani told IANS in between sobs.
"My family and friends knew I was doing some modelling assignments in Mumbai."
And there are more like her.
A frontline community healthcare group, the AIDS Prevention Society (APS),
engaged in an intervention project among sex workers in Assam's main city of
Guwahati got wind of the Mumbai bar dancers operating in the city.
"We met some of the bar girls in one of our sessions and soon found out that
they were pushed into prostitution after they returned home from Mumbai," APS
chairperson S.I. Ahmed told IANS.
Former sex workers who are now peer educators for the APS-run campaign named
Project Shakhi encouraged the bar dancers to undertake 'voluntary confidential
counselling and testing' at the APS health centres in the city.
"Two of the bar girls tested HIV positive. Probably they might have been
infected with the virus while they were in Mumbai itself although it was
confirmed only recently during tests," Ahmed said.
"A young Guwahati guy spent a few days with one of these two bar girls a week
back without taking any precautions. The same girl a few days later tested
HIV-positive at my clinic. This is a very disturbing trend."
Rani was conned into becoming a bar dancer by a man from Mumbai who visited
Guwahati in 2002 like so many others in the region.
"I know many girls from Assam and other northeastern states working as bar
girls in Mumbai and other cities recruited by the same person who took me
there," she said.
Health experts are also worried about young girls and women from middleclass
families engaged in an organised prostitution racket in the region.
"In the past one month, four young women from quite well-to-do families in
Guwahati had tested HIV-positive at my clinic. We found they were part of an
organised sex trade in the city with mobile telephones doing the trick," Ahmed
said.
"Young men in the region, despite being aware about HIV-AIDS, are found to be
taking great risks by going for unprotected sex. This is a very dangerous trend
indeed."
India accounts for about 5.1 million HIV-positive people, next only to South
Africa. The northeast has been declared one of India's high-risk zones with
close to 100,000 people infected with HIV.
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