Aizawl: The night-shelter for women scheme, initiated by Salvation Army group, is bringing a ray of hope in the dark hopeless world of Mizo women who are getting lost in the world of prostitution and poverty.
The shelter home, supported by Mizoram State Aids Control Society, located in the heart of the city, aims to pave the way for women sex workers to return to their homes with a secured life.
According to statistics of a city-based Human Rights Law Network in Mizoram, there are around 1000 commercial women sex workers across the state of which most are divorcees and drug addicts.
?Most of the women who stay in Aizawal are sex workers, who were all driven out of their houses due to broken family,? said the chief co-ordinator of the shelter home, Lalngaihawmi.
An average of 10 women a month come to the shelter, seeking help for a new life and willing to return to their respective destinations, she added.
?Our shelter home is opened in the night for any women, especially for those who have been displaced and do not have a proper shelter to sleep, can come, have food and stay, as long as they can, at free of cost," she said.
There will be three peer educators committed to assisting and counseling those who are trapped in addiction, genuinely seeking a return to a drug free life.
?This home is just one step more than the counseling centre,'' she added.
She says, ?Our job is not only just to make these women return to the mainstream of life, but also to do the reconciliation work with their family, for their safe return.?
Claiming that the centre has a 100 per cent success rate in bringing them to normal life, Lalngaihawmi narrates, ''we neither judge, criticise nor look down on any woman nor do we turn away those who have faced the courts and humiliations, but we genuinely seek a return to a normal free life.''
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