A Study on Prostitution and its Legality

Prostitution is a business of engaging sexual activity in exchange for payment. In India prostitution is legal but no express provision is present stating it’s legality but trafficking is illegal. Not only women but children as well as transgender people engage in prostitution. Sex workers in India have difficulty to access health care and face discrimination as in the society prostitution or anyone associated with prostitution is seen as a bad stigma to the society. People who engage in prostitution have to get proper health checkup on a regular basis without any barriers. The objective of the research are to examine the factors behind the women’s entry into sex work, to identify the abuses faced by the sex workers, to examine the agreeability towards the implementation of government schemes made for sex workers, to study the opinion on the discrimination faced by the sex workers on day to day life and to study on the violation of the rights of sex workers by the people in society. The research was done as descriptive research and the data was collected through questionnaires and the sample size is 208. The collected data was studied through a convenience sampling method, the data was collected in and around Chennai. The independent variable of the research are age, educational qualifications, employment status, marital status and gender whereas the dependent variable of the research were examine the factors behind the women’s entry into sex work, to identify the abuses faced by the sex workers, to examine the agreeability towards the implementation of government schemes made for sex workers, to study the opinion on the discrimination faced by the sex workers on day to day life and to study on the violation of the rights of sex workers by the people in society and the tools that were used for analysis are graphs, chi-square and anova. The important findings of the research are that poverty and illiteracy are the factors behind women entry into sex work and rape, physical abuse and inability to negotiate safe sex are strongly agreed by the respondents as the abuses faced by the sex workers.