The Politics of Language: Why Sex is Not Work

This oral history is captured from a speech that the founder of Indian anti-sex trafficking organization, Apne Aap Women Worldwide, gave at an international conference, Last Girl First, in Delhi on 30 January 2017. The conference aimed at showcasing the intersecting inequalities of class, caste, gender, race, ethnicity, religion that make women and girls vulnerable to sex-trafficking. It highlighted through the voices of survivors, activists, labour leaders, politicians, doctors and academics, why prostitution is male sexual violence on women and how renaming it as ‘sex-work’ legitimises the exploitation. The author describes how she started Apne Aap, meaning self-action in Hindi with a few prostituted women, and learned from them and the other thousands of women who joined Apne Aap later, that their prostitution was an absence of choice, not a choice. She explains the consequences of language – how the term ‘sex-worker’ created policies that entrenched the exploitation of prostituted women, leaving no room for exit and excusing States from investing in the basic needs of The Last Girl and in the working rights of women.

The Insider Voice about Prostitution

This piece* has been put together by drawing from Red Light Despatch (RLD), a monthly newsletter brought out by Indian anti-sex trafficking organization Apne Aap Women Worldwide. RLD is for the women of the red-light area by the women of the red-light area. Women, girls and men trapped in prostitution from the red-light areas of Bihar, Delhi, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and West Bengal write the Despatch. They write for each other and share information, dreams, struggles and hopes in solidarity from different corners of India. They try to address the gaps in mainstream media that often do not cover information that is relevant to the poor and the marginalized. RLD also serves as a mouthpiece for prostituted women and survivors to end sex trafficking. The narratives in RLD reveal that prostitution is a form of violence against women and the only way to end it is by internalizing the Gandhian principles of ahimsa (non-violence) and antyodaya (uplift of the last). The narratives speak of how the prostituted child and woman is always originally trafficked and that she is the victim of structural violence as a female, as a person from the countryside, as a person from a scheduled caste/scheduled tribe or other backward classes and of unequal and lopsided development; and how difficult it is to exit prostitution.

S1P and the birth of platelets

Recent work has highlighted the multitude of biological functions of sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P), which include roles in hematopoietic cell trafficking, organization of immune organs, vascular development, and neuroinflammation. Indeed, a functional antagonist of S1P1 receptor, FTY720/Gilenya, has entered the clinic as a novel therapeutic for multiple sclerosis. In this issue of the JEM, Zhang et al. highlight yet another function of this lipid mediator: thrombopoiesis. The S1P1 receptor is required for the growth of proplatelet strings in the bloodstream and the shedding of platelets into the circulation. Notably, the sharp gradient of S1P between blood and the interstitial fluids seems to be essential to ensure the production of platelets, and S1P appears to cooperate with the CXCL12–CXCR4 axis. Pharmacologic modulation of the S1P1 receptor altered circulating platelet numbers acutely, suggesting a potential therapeutic strategy for controlling thrombocytopenic states. However, the S1P4 receptor may also regulate thrombopoiesis during stress-induced accelerated platelet production. This work reveals a novel physiological action of the S1P/S1P1 duet that could potentially be harnessed for clinical translation.