Meet Our Members - Women's Initiatives

Written on 03 February 2023.

Women’s Initiatives (WINS) is a member of GAATW in Southern India. In November 2022, GAATW spoke to Meera Raghavendra, founder of WINS, to learn more about the history and current work of the organization.

GAATW: Can you tell us when WINS started, what was its vision and mission?

Meera Raghavendra: My name is Meera. In the early 1990s, I did post-grad in Social Work. After I married, I moved from my home state of Tamil Nadu to Andhra Pradesh. When I started working, I realised that there were not many women’s organisations. HIV and AIDS were raging at the time and many women were affected. They were seen as carriers and spreaders of AIDS and policymakers echoed this attitude. We understood that women on the margins like sex workers and single women have to be informed and made aware about HIV.

A collective of sex workers gathered in front of a police station.

It was a group of women friends who started the organisation. This experience opened our eyes and we learnt so much about gender and sexuality by working with women, especially sex workers. These were the women on the streets, facing violence everyday - be it from fellow vendors, police, and customers...They were already facing so much and HIV was added to this pile. We were trying to increase their awareness of the risk of HIV. Slowly through the sincerity of our work, they started to trust us. Tirupathi, where we work, is a very small town. We started identifying policemen who were harassing women and we started talking to them. It made news at the time because women were supporting women, breaking stigmas. Sex workers are service providers but treated with stigma. In the night you have sex with them, but immediately after you start harassing them, beating them, extorting them.

So this is how we began, we wanted to promote the human rights of sex workers. It was not easy as WINS was the first group to help women discuss this in the open. We started a free STD clinic for women - it was an open space and a lot of people started coming to us to clear their doubts. Meanwhile, condoms also began to be discussed in the public sphere. But women couldn’t access condoms. We worked with the government to procure, stock and distribute condoms. In fact, with our efforts, for the first time the government hospitals allowed a sex worker to work as a counsellor. However, she was not treated well by the other staff and we had to fight to assert her rights as a trained social worker. When the post-graduate students needed information about STDs, they needed sex worker counsellors, but they were treated badly because of prejudices. We sensitised the staff about this.

In the early 2000s, the Bill Gates programme entered the HIV field. While it had its benefits, it also changed the fabric of work in India. Everything started to be quantified, they were chasing numbers, like outreach targets. There were a lot of biomedical interventions and a top-down approach, which was not the kind of the work that we were doing. We tried to tell them that this would undermine the human rights aspects. But there was a lot of pressure from donors. We had to step back from many projects, because our approach was to strategise with the community by putting women at the centre. For us, it cannot be merely about numbers or targets. Most of the time, women were blamed for being carriers, even if they had contracted the virus from their husbands. A woman was killed in one of the villages for being HIV-positive. We took up this case… the authorities didn’t like it because it made the news.

Regarding our vision, we want to see a world without oppression and discrimination. The world belongs not just to men but to all human beings. We want a world where cooperation exists instead of competition. Also, we want debate, dialogue and communication on sexuality which is a silenced topic in Indian society.

GAATW: It must have been challenging to talk about sex work, women’s sexuality, and the rights of sex workers. What kind of responses were you getting from society, the government and from other women?

MR: It is only when I started working that I realised how deep the stigma around sex work is. I remember an incident from that time where a sex worker’s child was taken away by the police. In court, there was no one apart from her community members to stand with her. We gave her support and stood with her all day and she was surprised to see that. Because of this support, she was able to understand that we are sincere, and she said that together we can go to the sites where sex workers work and see their situation. They used to work in railway bogeys, in burial grounds - places unimaginable for others. I also made sure to take a sex worker with me whenever we went to meetings and ensured that they speak. We had to constantly counter people’s questions about the sexuality and sex life of our staff and members, and had to keep asserting ethical and gender-sensitive behaviour. We used to carry small information brochures about how HIV is transmitted and what the signs are, providing awareness about sexual organs, infections, condoms. It was public education, with women taking the lead. We used very simple strategies to go to the community for awareness. We were fighting the condescending attitude of society towards women sex workers, and also to make women understand that they can take leadership positions, which they’ve done over the years.

Now, women have formed community organisations in each district, based on the same work philosophy as ours. We formed a state network ‘Me and My World: network of sex workers’ and are now part of National Network of Sex Workers.

A celebration of women farmers day.

GAATW: Apart from sex work, what other issues do you work on?

MR: We work with sex workers, women farmers, and the Trans community. We used to run a free STD clinic in an urban area. The women who came to the clinic would share that they are stigmatised in their villages for being HIV positive or widows of HIV-infected person. They were shamed severely. We realised the need to work in the villages too. HIV mostly affects women, sexual minorities and vulnerable men but we don’t box people into separate groups. In the south of India, sex work is not done in ‘red light areas’. A trans person may be selling vegetables along with selling sex. People have 4-5 different jobs including sex work. So we don’t group them solely as sex worker or trans sex worker. We try to create a discrimination-free space, so that people can evolve as leaders and work according to their needs. Sometimes, we used to send trans women leaders for collectivising sex workers, and they were well accepted there.

Meanwhile, we attended a meeting of women farmers, where we learnt about how women are not given recognition or rights as farmers despite doing farm work all their lives. We saw a similarity of experience, where women farmers are also deprived of their rights, don’t have land titles, don’t own resources. Widows face this even more starkly. Some of the HIV-positive women were also farmers. When we started working with them, many would say to us “we are just labourers and not farmers”. This showed the extent to which women’s labour is unrecognised and unvalued. This belief is internalised by women.

They feed us but are they getting fed? Do they have nutrition security, do they have food security? These are the questions we tried to address. I’m happy to say that we have young women farmers with us who talk about reproductive rights, farm work. They get a space to explore themselves, they can come to the cities... Earlier they could never go out of the village and stay overnight somewhere without a male companion. Now they have formed their own cooperatives where they can procure seeds. The cooperatives also give them confidence. Earlier the women felt shy to come in public and hold placards saying they’re women farmers. But women from our other projects also joined them. We made sure our transgender members also joined these efforts. We made constant efforts to destigmatise the identity and work with different sections. It evolved over the years with different efforts.

GAATW: From your experience, do sex workers come from certain communities? Caste must be a major factor that pushes people into sex work.

MR: Definitely. I’d say around 70% of people doing sex work are from marginalised and oppressed communities and castes. But this was coupled with factors such as violence at home, cruel husbands, bad marriages, lack of family support - all of which push many women into sex work. Violence within families cuts across communities and is a big factor affecting women’s choices.

A meeting of the General Body of the Women Farmers Collective

GAATW: What are the interactions like between the different groups you work with? Do stigmas and prejudice also affect one group’s interaction with another?

MR: When people join our organisation, we make sure to give them social analysis - that our society is gendered, it’s structured by systems which oppress them. It’s important to look at oppression in a structural way. Then, we get to talking about the self - self-respect, self-awareness. We always emphasise understanding the power structure, how power operates. When a woman understands this, she can gather confidence to access resources, government offices. Forming networks and meeting others from different regions also drives home the point that we are one, we have similarities that bind us. In the beginning, different groups may have prejudice about another, but with time and interactions, they loosen up. For example, when people share similar experience of police harassment, things change and they form connections.

We give certain minimum trainings to everybody, and then some specific trainings that the groups need. A sense of solidarity is gradually built.

GAATW: What are some of the challenges you face in the work? What was the impact on Covid-19 on the communities and work that you do?

MR: Covid hit them very badly. Sex workers couldn’t get medical relief or support and faced discrimination and humiliation during Covid relief. After these experiences, some started using Zoom and become digitally literate. We supported them by giving them smart phones. One of the sex worker leaders mobilised funds and we too contacted a donor. It helped us set up a helpdesk for sex workers during Covid. It was a mobile unit to meet others, intervene in cases of violence, and provide relief. Without community help, sex workers would have suffered even more.

The challenge is to get identity documents for sex workers. Without them, it’s impossible to get social protection whether it’s housing or health insurance. Another challenge is to change the law. The Supreme Court recently said that sex workers need to be treated with respect and can’t be kept in shelter homes against their will. This was a positive step, but it faces criticism from anti-trafficking groups. The implementation has seen many challenges too because of prejudices. There is forced testing for HIV and women can’t get abortion or even rent rooms for living, without the presence of husbands. All these affect poor women the most. The rules are insensitive and discriminatory, and even when the laws are positive, the implementation of medical or other basic rights is a problem.

Women farmers faced huge challenges too. They have small pieces of land, so, luckily they had some greens and vegetables during Covid. But when they want to do something on a bigger scale, they have to lease land which is a difficult task. Getting land at a reasonable price or selling produce at the minimum price is very difficult. The mandis (big markets for wholesale of vegetables) are not women-friendly, so it is mostly the men who go to the markets.

Sexual harassment is another big challenge. It is difficult for women to report it because of the entrenched patriarchy at all levels.

GAATW: How do you incorporate the voices of the communities you work with in your work? How do you try to learn from them?

MR: Our basic philosophy is that women can lead if they are given the opportunities. For many people, it is difficult to imagine that women can lead, that women have specific needs and so on. For example, a company promoting FPOs (Farmer Producer Organisation) contacted us for work and were shocked to hear that ours is a women FPO. Women workers, sex workers, farmers are all facing similar stigma. I’ve faced it too. I make it a point to include all other women, to translate for them, to enable their voices to be heard. Another step is a transparent budget. Once a budget is approved, we send it to the community and explain each head, so that the community is aware of their entitlement. The idea is that their voices and needs are given space, both in letter and spirit. Whatever we write, we try to implement it. One of our sex worker members is a representative of Community Technical Resource Group at the state level, which then gives recommendations at the national level.

I’ve seen that some educated women too are used to hierarchical and top-down way of thinking in other organisations and in society, so we try to make them unlearn these things. We all have a lot to learn and unlearn in our behaviour.

This inclusion cannot be tokenistic, we have to put people from affected communities in decision-making positions and also train and mentor them. We are attempting to be an equal opportunity employer, but it’s not easy.

GAATW: These are all the questions we had. Is there anything you would like to add?

MR: I would like to add about the issue of rehabilitation of sex workers which is often talked about by the authorities. I want to say that sex work is livelihood and it’s work for many of the women. They don’t want to be rehabilitated but often are forced to. The police have to learn to respect them and take into account all their concerns, like their children’s education and future. Raids and detentions shouldn’t happen at all.

Women farmers should get land titles. They have a right to own the land, they’ve been working on it for years. The government gives land so easily to private companies for the special economic zones, so why not for the women farmers? They have more knowledge about the land than anyone else. These are some of the issues we will continue to talk about.

GAATW: Thank you for taking the time to share your valuable experiences with us.