Raided. How Anti-Trafficking Strategies Increase Sex Workers’ Vulnerability to Exploitative Practices

This document is a compilation of findings of research to understand the impact of anti-trafficking laws and policies on women in sex work in India. This study was undertaken as a partnership between Rights4Change, SANGRAM and VAMP.

This report is the result of research carried out by Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP) and Sampada Grameen Mahila Sanstha (SANGRAM) in cooperation with sex worker collectives in Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Jharkhand. The research examines the impact of The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA) on the protection of the human rights of sex workers. It discusses the relevant national and international legal frameworks, analyses the case law on sex work. Above all, it gives voice to sex workers themselves.

This research study employed the RighT Guide,a tool to investigate and analyse the human rights effects of anti-trafficking laws and policies, link these to the human rights obligations of the government, and use the outcomes to more effectively advocate for rights-based and evidence-led policy reforms.

Discussions on anti-trafficking measures have often been overshadowed by debates on prostitution per se as violence and slavery of women; and further muddied by a conflation with sexual exploitation of children. Anti-trafficking initiatives have been largely responsible for the conflation of trafficking and sex work, leading to an overriding conception of sex work itself as ‘violence’, ignoring the violation of the human rights of sex workers and trafficked persons.

This has led to a division between anti-trafficking organizations on the one hand and sex workers’ rights organizations on the other. This division has also led to strategies that advocate the abolition of sex work rather than protecting the rights of women in sex work. The anti-trafficking discourse also tends to invalidate the narratives of millions of women migrants. Safe migration and the right to choose a livelihood continue to be hindered by narrow conversations on morality and culture.

The present research is an attempt to forefront the experiences of women in sex work who have been raided, rescued and rehabilitated. We examine women’s narratives along with quantitative data about the strategies of raid, rescue and rehabilitation deployed to combat trafficking of women into sex work. The study unravels the impact of laws and policies on the lives of sex workers. We centre the research around the experiences of women who were ‘rescued’ in raids, ‘rehabilitated’ for varying periods of time, and are now back in sex work. These complex narratives show a non-linear relationship between trafficking and the decision to continue in sex work.