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the reluctant assistance of their wives and girlfriends. Of course the batteries would be testable on domestic torches and remote controls.
In these matters, public memory is very short. Hardly anybody would remember the final outcome of such detections by the Customs. Is the importer fined or on refusal to pay the fine sent to jail? Or, maybe it is later discovered that the officers were acting outside of their scope and the importer therefore blameless? More likely, may be an influential 
politician intervenes and the matter is settled quietly.
For all the seriousness the detection is given at the start, the weak outcome does not seem to matter in Sri Lanka. For the immediate, the sensibilities of the local public are sufficiently satisfied upon seeing the picture of the Customs men with their seized goods; in another society the public reaction to the picture would well be a loud ‘godayata magic vage’ or ‘what is this monkey business?’
Our Police force will not be easily outdone by the Customs in serving the native sensibilities. They evidently serve this need by raiding ‘brothels’ invariably operated in ‘posh’ areas of the city by madams with exotic names. Information about the raid is provided by Police spokesmen with salivating personal info of the sinful outfit, the age and residence of the offenders, marital status of the customers swept in during the raid and even career details of the madam, a matter of great interest apparently. A few days later the girls are paraded in a court house, to be ‘ashamed,’ ogled and finally punished by a righteous system.
In reality there cannot be a wider gap between these exhibitions of self-righteousness on the part of the machinery of the law and the pith and substance of these two services. Apparently there is hardly an officer in the Sri Lankan Customs who can explain his personal wealth on the basis of the emoluments received during his public career. The absurdity of a life spent on a pretence of an honest service can be seen at the airport where they unleash their full authority on the Middle Eastern returnees in whose shoddy bags apparently lie the secret of increasing public revenue.
In the case of the purveyors of the oldest profession it is another dimension at play. It is often said that prostitution is a victimless crime in the sense that all participants are there more or less on their own choice. On the other hand, it can be argued that things are never so simple and that evils like child prostitution, spread of disease, crime and a host of other things come with the profession. The contrarians may then point out that these evils are often the result of driving the practice underground and that the idea of public women is as old as civilisation itself. It is often desperate economic factors that drive women to the profession, making it a survival tool.
Obviously the issues involved are too complex to be discussed in a short newspaper article.
Our concern here is the obvious injustice of the treatment of the unfortunate women by the Police, the so-called enforcers of the law. It seems that these victims of circumstances are penalised further by an unjustifiable public humiliation. It is so unfair, particularly when the punishment is carried out by a Police force among whose top ranks are persons accused of even contract killings. Even if such blatant crimes are considered as exceptions, by and large the public opinion is that our Police force is riddled with corruption and is utterly politicised. So much so that no person identified as a supporter of the governing party will be punished by the law while opposing it is seemingly an offence by itself!
In the pervasive corruption of our times we have forgotten the idea that crime and punishment must be assessed relatively and proportionately. A blue collar worker returning from a foreign land with an undeclared wristwatch in her bag or a woman working in a brothel in order that she may feed her orphaned child is dragged to an open court to be humiliated. The real criminals, rich far beyond their occupations can justify, are feted as men of respect and substance. And as is the case with societies in inescapable decay, we simply have no answers but to turn the law’s righteous anger against the most helpless in society. In such a situation it is so easy to parade ‘Madam Exotica’ and her bevy of girls as the sum of what is ailing this sick society.
(The writer is an Attorney-at-Law and a freelance writer.)
