Dhaka: Bangladesh’s independent election commission (EC) has decided to acknowledge sex workers and journalists as professional groups as it incorporated 15 new job titles in its list of professions for electoral roll data base and national ID cards.
“The commission has decided to acknowledge 15 more professions . . .
including sex workers and journalists while the existing EC list named 25 professions,” an election commission spokesman told Gulf News.
He said the commission with chief election commissioner ATM Shamsul Huda took the decision yesterday, also acknowledging religious clerics, nurses, hairdressers, laundrymen, maids and domestic helps, gardeners, cleaners, cook, tailors, driver as job titles.
Previously they all were needed to register them in “others” category in the list of professionals while filling up the prescribed forms for voter list and national ID.
"If anyone wants to put sex work as a profession, we will recognise that.
There is nothing wrong with it. After all, it's one of the oldest professions on earth,” election commissioner Sakhawat Hossain told a news agency.
Sex is a taboo in Muslim majority Bangladesh but a woman could register
herself as a prostitute through district magistrates.
No official figure was available immediately to ascertain the number of prostitutes in Muslim majority Bangladesh but the AFP reported quoting charities that an estimated 200,000 people work in the booming sex trade in the country of
146 million people.
