Medicine, Prostitution, & Self-Defense
An Interview with Ronica Mukerjee

By Daniel Burton Rose

Dec. 20, 2003— Ronica Mukerjee has been busy. After working in recent years with two Seattle-based anti-violence projects, Home Alive and Chaya, as well as being an initial member of the Infernal Noise Brigade, Mukerjee is currently establishing a Chinese medicine practice in New York City.

DBR spoke with Mukerjee about her current work with prostitutes, her past work for a Calcutta-based child prostitution rescue and support organization, and the philosophy behind being a self-defense instructor.

DBR: Tell me how you became a self-defense instructor.

RM: I studied gong fu for three years in Seattle while doing prison and environmental activism. One day the executive director of Home Alive, Christien Storm, called me up and asked me if I wanted to become a self-defense instructor with the organization. Initially I thought, ‘Oh my god, I don’t think I can do this. Don’t you have to be really tough to be a self-defense instructor?’ I didn’t feel like I was tough enough. I said, “Thanks so much for the opportunity, but no.” I just didn’t feel like I could do it.

A day before the deadline for the new instructors’ training, I called Christien up and said, “Look. I want to do this. Can I still?” I went in for the interview.

DBR: What’s the client population of Home Alive?

RM: When I first started the client population was mixed. Some of the people came from homeless shelters or detox centers, some of them from colleges, universities, and community centers. There were housewives and people from Christian groups. There were a lot of different clients. I was hired to work with sex workers specifically. The program was funded by the Sexual Health Intervention Project, which was a part of the Seattle/King County Health Department. The purpose of the program was to recruit peer educators. Everyone involved, including me, was either a current or former sex worker in some capacity.

I spent a lot of my time going to different homeless shelters, strip clubs, and other places around the city that employed sex workers, either illegally or legally. I asked people if they wanted to be peer educators. They’d teach self-defense and general sexual health to other women. The ones who did received a small stipend. I saw these women every week. We started doing self-defense classes based on their input.

When I started recruiting, I’d drive up and down Aurora, a primary street for prostitution, as well as other sites in town. When I’d approach them, a lot of the women were like “Who’s this cop?!” Then people started to recognize me and feel more comfortable. To this day when I walk around Seattle I’m bound to see somebody who’s been in the class, or otherwise involved in the program.

DBR: How did Home Alive come about?

RM: It was in response to the murder of Mia Zapata, who was the lead singer for The Gits, a punk rock band. She was raped and murdered by the Green River Killer, as were an untold number of other women. A bunch of people got together and said, “Why do we not feel safe in our own communities? What can we do to change that?” One response was, “We need to go out and take self-defense classes and see what that’s like.” They looked into it and found it was expensive and the politics and philosophy behind the self-defense instruction that was going on were about straight, white, middle-class women feeling safe in their own skin. Which is problematic in and of itself-

DBR: -Especially because the Green River Killer specifically targeted countercultural people and prostitutes.

RM: Right. Exactly. None of these people looking for a solution to the problem of unsafe communities fit into the straight, white, middle-class demographic. They decided to form an organization. The basic mission of Home Alive, which has developed over the years, begins with the question, “How do we build safer communities?” Public violence and domestic abuse aren’t issues concerning only women. It’s an issue concerning building trusting relationships with your neighbors and friends. It’s about not relying on the police department, which is often so inadequate at providing protection for anybody.

The people involved with Home Alive while I was there had many different philosophies. Some of us believed that if someone beats up or rapes somebody you know, you go to their house with baseball bats and take care of the problem personally. Because getting involved with the police is never going to be rewarding.

DBR: You’ve also done self-defense instruction outside the United States. Can you tell me about that?

RM: I did instruction in Nuxalk territory in Bella Coola, Canada. The government-run forced assimilation schools remained on the Nuxalk reservation longer than nearly any other in the country. The people have been deprived of their language, of their culture and heritage. The product of the cultural violence inflicted by these assimilation programs is a community with an incredibly high rate of domestic violence.

A lot of the work that’s been going on there for the last ten to fifteen years has been teaching the Nuxalk language and relearning [Indian] identity. Classes are held for women who experience or have experienced domestic violence in the community. A domestic violence shelter flew me up there to teach classes. Around fifty women attended each class. We ran through different self-defense maneuvers and discussed the concept of self-defense. “What does it mean in this community? How can we practice it so it feels empowering instead of putting us in a constant place of defensiveness?” We discussed our criteria for engaging in a physical confrontation but also asked, “How can we communicate better?”

Those classes were very intense because there was so much history in that room. People would cry and dissociate, which is common in classes, but definitely a lot less common on, say, a Seattle college campus.

In Calcutta, India I taught self-defense classes for an organization called San Laap. San Laap is an organization specifically for girls who have been rescued from child prostitution. Trafficking in female children is big all over the world-including in the United States --but is a particularly big industry in Calcutta. Many women illegally sold into prostitution in Nepal and Bangladesh end up in Calcutta. Over sixty percent of the girls that I was teaching-and they were definitely “girls” — all under the age of eighteen — were HIV positive.

Even without being infected it’s difficult to get a job once you’ve been involved in prostitution because the communities are connected and it’s easy for potential employers to check on the backgrounds of people who might work for them. Let’s say one of the girls wants to work as a housekeeper, a common occupation for people with their limited opportunities. The people in the house immediately discover that she used to be a prostitute. And there’s a cultural stigma. Much of the time, they’re not going to accept her because of that.

DBR: So all the women you were working with had been prostitutes but no longer were?

RM: Correct. I did some work with women who were prostitutes, but that wasn’t the majority of my work.

DBR: If they had been sold into prostitution illegally, how did they get out of the slave state?

RM: They were rescued.

DBR: What does that entail?

RM: It entails a bunch of different things. More and more it involves women over the age of eighteen who were prostitutes coming to San Laap and other organizations, saying “There’s these underage girls over here,” and directing people in the organization to them. San Laap will go and take the girls out of the brothels. As you can imagine, these girls are kept in horrid conditions. One of the girls I worked with couldn’t speak anymore, she was so traumatized by her experience of continual rape. She was locked in a room for years and the men would come into her room and rape her.

A lot of these girls, after they turn eighteen, will go back into prostitution. There’s a couple of ways you can look at that. One is, after their involvement with the organization maybe they’ll have more access to resources that will make their work less dehumanizing. They can probably read and write better than they could before, and know where to get healthcare and other services many people take for granted. If they don’t do that, then they’ll have the skills to talk about and work through different situations that might arise in their everyday lives.

A lot of these girls were sheltered before they were sold into prostitution. They grew up in their parents’ households before they got married off or kidnapped and were all of the sudden in the middle of a brothel. There was no room for them to learn the skills required to communicate and function as an adult in the culture-not that you necessarily learn these skills anyway, but these girls had no opportunity to learn them.

DBR: In your last trip to Calcutta you treated sex workers with Chinese medicine, as opposed to teaching them self-defense, correct?

RM: Yes. These were adult women working as prostitutes. Maybe they’d been trafficked into it, but now they’re consensually involved and unionized. I worked with an organization called the Durbar Mahila Swamamya Committee, which is basically a prostitute’s union. It’s based in Calcutta in a few different red light districts. My job there was to work with the women on whatever health problems they presented to me. I provided acupuncture and whatever else -- counseling, massage -- I felt was necessary.

DBR: What were the power differentials in working with prostitute clients in the United States compared with doing it in Calcutta? Are there a lot of similarities between the women?

RM: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. People in this country have the impression that women in India are more oppressed than in the United States. And maybe prostitutes in India are more oppressed than prostitutes in America. But the reality is that poverty is an oppressive force. So yes, there is poverty in the United States, I completely recognize that, but the degree of poverty in India is undeniably greater. The way that that manifests is a lack of access to education, to basic needs that are more available in the United States. I’m not saying that they’re available enough in the United States, but in India they’re just not available. For example, there’s no education on condom use or on different STDs and HIV prevention. There’s a lot of mythology and misguided spirituality injected into sexual discourses and practices so that people are more confused than informed. Some things said to be tradition are just ways to bamboozle people into doing what others want.

Prostitution occupies the lowest position of the employment totem pole....and as a result it’s hard for them to get a bank account or access civil services. And it’s very difficult for people to talk about their health with healthcare providers. As it is in this country. There aren’t a lot of health care practitioners to whom you can say, “I’m a prostitute! Help me with my problem,” you know?

DBR: In medicine the initial step in treating a client is to stop the infliction of the injury. Then you start dealing with the impact of the injury. But in sex work, I imagine, people are coming in with histories of abuse, and the injury is constantly being re-inflicted. How do you deal with that as a practitioner?

RM: The first thing is respecting people where they’re at. This is an important aspect of practicing medicine. You can adjust things and when they don’t work you move on. You figure out ways to work with people anyway. I definitely treated a lot of hip and lower back pain with these women. I got really good results, but I have no doubt that the results do not remain intact, because people have to do the same work.

Some say that you’re actually doing people more harm when you provide a short period of relief and then discontinue the treatment, because the patient has a glimpse of what it would feel like to be in a state of health, but they have to go back to their dis-equilibrium.

I disagree with this perspective. Any reprieve you can give people from physical pain is a gift.

http://www.agrnews.org/issues/258/culture.html#1