So thank you all for coming to that last.
Also coming out of the church, especially those of you who are messy students, freaking out about your Facebook keystroke.
It's my pleasure to welcome proper Coach Suarez and his professor of law and social justice at King's College London.
Her main areas of research include criminal law, transnational criminal law, sociology of law,
postcolonial theory, a feminist legal theory, and probably written a number of books,
including Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labour, about sex work in the Law in India, and has a new book out this year called Governance Feminism.
Her work has been recognised by a number of prizes and awards and has been funded by a range of international research councils.
And currently she's heading a large European Research Council grant on the laws of social production until March 29,
when we are all here today to talk to us about sexual politics of anti-trafficking discourse.
Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for your kind introduction.
Can you hear me on the back? Yeah. Okay, great. So thank you all for being here.
And the weather has kept up with us. So my talk today is titled The Sexual Politics of Anti-Trafficking Discourse.
And the goal of the paper is actually to revisit the contentious history of the sexual politics, of anti-trafficking discourse,
and to take stock of how it has evolved since the earliest point at which feminists influenced it in the 1990s.
So what I'll do today is to give you a quick snapshot of how anti-trafficking law and policy have developed at the international level.
And I think it's fair to say that the anti-trafficking field has gone from an early,
almost exclusive preoccupation of trafficking with sex work to now addressing exploitation in various labour sectors.
So this might suggest you to just focus on the nature of the work performed with agree and then a greater
focus on the conditions under which the labours perform so that all forms of extreme labour exploitation,
but then sex work or fishing or cotton cultivation would actually attract the application of anti-trafficking law.
So the questions that I pose in this paper are as follows.
So almost 20 years since the Palermo Protocol on trafficking was adopted,
I ask whether the broadening of the legal parameters of trafficking to various sectors has in fact meant that,
legally speaking, trafficking is no longer conflated with trafficking for sex work?
Or would sex and sex work itself?
Secondly, even if legally there is a delinking between trafficking and sex work, does it translate into practices on the ground?
In other words, are sex workers harassed less than they were before?
I'm also interested in what this means for feminist theorising on sex work and feminist mobilising on trafficking.
And I want to ask what it has meant for sex workers themselves in terms of how they understand
trafficking and how they have lobbied vis a vis the state on anti-trafficking law.
Importantly, I'm curious to find out what it has meant for proposals for redistribution within the sex sector to minimise,
if not eliminate the exploitation of sex workers. And I'm also interested in asking what the sexual politics of anti-trafficking discourse
tells us about the post-colonial state and the terrains on which feminist sex workers,
conservative and left progressive movements, engage both with each other as well as with the state,
and what alliances are made and where do we find success.
And these alliances failed to materialise and why.
And specifically in the context of the developing world, I'm curious to interrogate the relationship between the international and the domestic,
because there is often an assumption that domestically the change is largely influenced by developments in the international arena.
And I'm curious if this is the case and if not, what really drives policy change?
So these are some of the questions that I want to address today.
And in doing so, I'm inspired by Elizabeth Bernstein's new book called Broken Subjects Sex Trafficking and the Politics of Freedom,
where she undertakes what she calls an ethnography of discourse.
And she understands discourses to mean a constellation of words,
realities and practices as they coalesce in historically and culturally situated base,
constructing the empirical object under consideration and the social locations in which it is manifest.
So according to her, it's not merely a reference to language as separate from the real world,
but is organise sets of signifying practices that bridge both.
And although I did not actually set out to systematically study anti-trafficking stakeholders in
the way that Bernstein does in her superb ethnography as a feminist scholar of sex work in India,
I've actually tracked anti-trafficking policy for several years,
and in the past three years I've increasingly embraced an academic activist role in mobilising labour groups,
as well as trade unions to engage with the issue of trafficking and also lobby members of Parliament with a multi-sector.
Critic of Indian governments, trafficking of persons. And actually preparing for this talk has given me an opportunity to reflect on some of
these struggles and the shifts in discourse that I have witnessed at close quarters.
Am I going too fast or so quick? So I'll say a little bit here about the anti-trafficking transnational order.
Now, sexual politics has been called to the framing of anti-trafficking law and policy since the 1900s.
But today I'll speak only to the most recent wave of legislative activity around this issue.
So and some of this you may already be quite familiar with, so I'll try to go through it briefly.
So as you may know, since the late 1990s, there's an extensive transnational legal order that has developed to deal with trafficking.
And it's built around the 2000 U.N. protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children.
It's often referred to as the Palermo Protocol,
and it supplements the U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime, which was also adopted in 2000.
Now the protocol was negotiated within two years, quote unquote, at lightning speed on the UN block.
This is according to Simmons and Lloyd.
And the protocol is adopted in 2000, and it came into force in 2003 and has been exceptionally well ratified by around 173 countries to date.
Now, if you look at the development of this transnational legal order over the past 18 years,
you can discern at least three phases, a phase between 2000 and 2009,
which was the heyday of sex work exceptionalism, a phase between 2009 and 2014 when close attention was paid to labour trafficking.
Then the invisible, the competing streams of modern slavery and forced labour.
And from 2014, when legal interventions were framed explicitly in terms of slavery and forced labour,
and this began to be enacted at the national as well as international levels.
Now, if you look at the first phase between 2000 2009, it is a period characterised by what I call textbook exceptionalism.
So as we know, trafficking has long been associated with prostitution.
Hence, there was no surprise that the existing sex work legal order emerging from the 1950 UN Convention for the
Suppression of the Trafficking in Persons actually casts a long shadow over the anti-trafficking regime.
So and this has been well documented that associated actors, both governmental and non-governmental,
disagreed fundamentally and along ideological lines on the normative status of sex work and therefore the remit of the crime of trafficking.
So I knew American feminists occupied a position, a range of positions on prostitution from new abolitionism on one side to pro sex worker agency.
And they played a crucial role in negotiating the protocol itself.
And we can find traces of new abolitionists instruments on the protocol in the very definition of trafficking under Article three of the protocol.
So, for example, Article three of the protocol, which defines trafficking, lists a list several means through which trafficking can be accomplished.
And one of these means is a term that is quite unheard of in legal systems around the world.
And this phrase is the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability.
And the the idea of inserting this phrase commonly to say in the protocol,
was to ensure that even women who entered into voluntary sex work would somehow
be brought within this more structured understanding of what vulnerability is.
Similarly, the Article three clarifies that the consent of the victim to exploitation is immaterial.
Some of the means listed in Article three are used,
and this was again meant commonly to see to cover even voluntary sex workers who had consented to sex work where their vulnerability had been abused.
So we find that in the initial years of the trafficking protocol, trafficking was invariably conflated with sex trafficking and with sex work.
And so I term this development, sex work exceptionalism,
by which I mean the characterisation by abolitionist groups who modelled themselves after 18th century abolitionists of simply like
William Wilberforce of the sale of sex for money as an egregious violation of human dignity and is exceptionally harmful for women.
And second, the overwhelming association of trafficking with trafficking for sex work and sex work, etc.
And now again, as you may be familiar, the US had a huge role to play in disseminating this this model of sex work exceptionalism,
primarily during the time that the Bush administration was in power, where the US government,
which was keen to abolish the sex industry, named and shamed countries through the Trafficking in Persons report that's issued
every year in June under the Trafficking of Victims and Protection Act of 2000.
So this had ripple effects across the world.
The countries were compelled to specifically target prostitution in their anti-trafficking laws as a way of moving up the TTIP report rankings.
Now Western states that's used anti-trafficking policy for kerbing sex work and for border control purposes while emerging.
Such as Brazil, China and India actually narrowly construed trafficking as trafficking for sex work precisely
because they wanted to deflect attention from their vast domestic problem of labour trafficking.
So according to commentators, a robust sex panic accompanied this first phase of the development of the trafficking legal order.
And this has been extensively documented by feminists, both in relation to its historical antecedent,
which is the anti white slavery campaigns at the turn of the 20th century,
and its contemporary use to allay fears about globalisation through a yearning for a
familiar race and gender order that in women's migration was thought to be discouraged.
Now, in the second phase, with a change of administration in the US, what we find is some 29.
The US State Department, in its own move to pivot,
begins to focus on labour trafficking in place of its previous sordid preoccupation with sex trafficking and sex work.
And we find the combination of the waning of an exclusive emphasis on sex work,
along with increased visibility of the international labour organisations.
Interventions on forced labour meant that there was a there was new thinking around the scope of anti-trafficking law.
We find critics of the anti-trafficking framework putting forward what they call the labour paradigm of trafficking and anti-trafficking laws,
which earlier defined trafficking purely in terms of sex trafficking now being defined more broadly to cover labour trafficking as this.
Now, from around 2012, we find that trafficking became increasingly reframed in terms of both slavery and forced labour.
And as we all know, a new term was coined by Nottingham sociologist.
He was at Holden, Kevin Beers, namely modern slavery.
And the definition of modern slavery has varied over time.
But the latest iteration is that it's an umbrella term which covers various phenomena, including trafficking,
forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage and the sale and exploitation of children.
So this idea of modern slavery, which actually has no definition and international law, found purchased with several governments.
And so the UK passed the Modern Slavery Act in 2015 and there are several other countries
which have either passed a similar law or are contemplating a modern slavery legislation.
And again, as you may know,
the Walkley Foundation then took this idea of modern slavery and it's founded by an Australian mining magnate and philanthropist Andrew Forrest,
who then produced the Global Slavery Index in 2013 and then subsequently in 2014, 16 and 80.
And so much like the TTIP reports, it really ranks countries in terms of their modern slavery problem.
And we also find that influenced by the California Transparency in Supply
Chains Act and the Supply Chain Transparency Clause in the Modern Slavery Act.
Several governments are now targeting forced labour in global supply and commodity chains.
Now, alongside this focus on modern slavery,
we find the ILO is staking a claim to leadership in this area by releasing several reports
on forced labour starting in 2005 and also updating its forcible convention of 1930,
which primarily focussed on forced labour used by governments. So we have a 2014 protocol to the forcible convention.
However, the definition of relationship between trafficking and forced labour is quite unsettled and there has been a fair
bit of contestation around whether forced labour is the umbrella term or whether trafficking is the umbrella term.
In other words, is trafficking a subset of forced labour or this forcible subset of trafficking?
And so this wasn't enough.
The ILO, in its attempt to both exist through, you know, funding from foundations and governments, but also to remain relevant on this issue,
has recently joined hands with the Walk Through Foundation to produce a global estimates of modern slavery in 2017.
So again, this is complicated the field furthermore, because the umbrella to modern slavery now includes trafficking in forced labour.
Now why do these definitions matter? Like they matter?
Because they make certain presumptions about what trafficking actually is, and they tend to also reflect preferred regulatory pathways.
So this is a very sort of simplistic portrayal of what these main approaches to trafficking are, but one can discern roughly three approaches.
One is the criminal justice approach,
where trafficking is viewed as an exceptional aberration to otherwise normal circuits of commerce and exchange in a globalised world,
thus warranting the corrective hand of the criminal law. We then have the human rights approach, which stays within the criminal law paradigm,
but it simply seeks to mitigate the harshness of criminal law by bolstering the human rights of victims of trafficking.
And you know, it's no secret that governments actually prefer the organised crime stream because this empowers governments.
But police. And partly because the trafficking protocol really arose from the alignment of geopolitical
interests of developed countries to police borders in the wake of globalisation.
The third approach to trafficking is the labour approach,
which essentially understands the difference between the exploitation of workers and trafficking as a matter of degree,
not as kind and points to the role of restrictive immigration to James and delivery directly to leverage in producing extradition and subordination.
And, you know,
Labour scholars argue that this is just these restrictive labour and immigration divisions that actually render workers vulnerable to trafficking.
Now, why the criminal justice approach is driven by a mythology of isolated bad apples or traffickers.
Advocates of the labour approach actually argue that it is only by addressing the criminal.
I argue that addressing just the criminal acts of individual traffickers actually entrenches a
politics of exception and in the meantime legitimises a range of other exploitative labour practices.
Now, this yet another development to this to this anti-trafficking framework,
which is the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals with a specific target, 8.7 is devoted to trafficking and forced labour.
And one can find that actually there is a nascent development approach to trafficking that has also emerged, and which I'm happy to talk about later.
But I think for our purposes today, if you just look at the issue of trafficking,
we can see that what started off with campaigns against the forced movement of women across
borders for prostitution in the 1990s has today morphed into consumers worrying about slaves,
quote unquote, who wash our cars, do our knees, service our hotels, and manufacture the clothes we read and the chocolate we consume.
So we've seen really a huge shift in the way that trafficking or modern slavery is understood.
And correspondingly, the trafficking protocol has spawned a stunning legal and extralegal architecture, which is expanding as we speak.
The most recent addition being the Lichtenstein Initiative for the Financial Sector Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking,
which was set up in 2000 meetings. It's a very dynamic field.
And what is interesting is, despite its prolific development,
this particular trafficking legal order has actually been quite poorly institutionalised.
So if you look at the rates of conviction under anti-trafficking laws, the numbers are quite abysmal.
So I won't go into details on it. But if you look at the success of reports produced by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime,
the number of convictions run into the thousands rather than the millions.
You know, we are told there are 45 million slaves around the world, but really you find that the number of convictions are quite abysmal.
And the UNODC itself admits that although there was an initial proliferation of anti-trafficking laws around the world,
in fact the rate as enacted has been stagnated at a low level.
And these are the words of the year A.S.
Now, there are various factors for the poor enforcement of anti-trafficking laws, and I think I've only alluded to some of these,
which is, you know, actually, no one is very clear about what trafficking exactly means,
you know, in the sort of popular consciousness,
but also particularly when it comes to prosecutors who are trying to decide what is the threshold before they, in fact, prosecute trafficking crimes.
Part of the problem certainly is what experts call expectation creep.
You know, this expansion of the idea of trafficking to cover various forms of labour exploitation.
Now, what is interesting, of course, is despite its poor implementation,
the nexus between trafficking and the crackdown on sex work remains quite strong, even 20 years after the protocol was adopted.
So some countries continue to define trafficking in terms of sex work like prison.
There are others that distinguish between innocent victims who are trafficked into sex work and willing sex work,
sex workers who are not legally innocent.
In the case of Romania, or countries that equate adult sex workers with children so that their consent is not required for proving tracking.
Of course, we are also aware of the Swedish model which the trafficking protocol you give an impetus to
and the Swedish model of criminalising demand for sex work has since become quite popular,
with many countries legislating along those very similar lines.
Now this is the case for the US as well, where in a recent study victims were shown to have been arrested in 60% of all states,
even cases where victims are not supposed to be arrested for trafficking and many of them were actually arrested for prostitution related offences.
It's the same case in Singapore where on the face of it, trafficking is defined as extending to various labour sectors.
But in reality, anti-trafficking strategies identify victims of sex trafficking and undocumented migrants.
So. Even the best champion of the testing protocol.
And Gallagher, who's an international lawyer,
has recently remarked that the trafficking for sexual exploitation to seize the lion's share of criminal justice,
attention and resources in most, if not all, countries.
So it's clear that the trafficking legal order remains preoccupied with sex work, exceptionalism, if not on paper, at least in practice.
And this has definitely precluded laws to strengthen protections for sex workers.
Now, what makes this association of the anti-trafficking legal order with sex work so enduring?
So in her new book, Elizabeth Bernstein argues that we need to go beyond some of the initial frameworks to explain this enduring association.
So some of the earlier explanations referred to as sex panic,
which experts argued was the reason why trafficking was associated overwhelmingly with sex work.
But what she argues is that a new politics of sex and gender is today brokered by the neoliberal state
and is entrenched in right wing and left wing spaces and is expressed in religious and secular terms.
So what she calls what is a comprehensive theory that addresses the sexual, humanitarian and late capitalist dimensions of anti-trafficking discourse.
So, for example,
she theorises the sexual politics inherent in anti-trafficking discourse in terms of the interests of what she calls carceral feminism.
She explains the humanitarian element in terms of militarised humanitarianism.
And she explains the late capitalist dimension in terms of its redemptive role in
seeming to solve the problem of trafficking rather than being the site of the problem.
So it's common to find corporations that are trying to come up with, you know, technological gadgets to deal with sex trafficking when in fact,
they are rife with it, extensive subcontracting arrangements and poor labour conditions.
And some of these corporations are very cynical about, in fact,
wanting to focus on trafficking so that there is less attention to the kinds of labour instruments that they've normalised.
Now, Bernstein further complicates the thesis of the strange bedfellows, because I think initially when anti-trafficking laws were passed,
there was a sense that radical feminist would push for these anti-trafficking laws somehow found
themselves in alliance with evangelical Christians who they hadn't intended to actually align with.
She offers a corrective to this perspective, and actually she says that there is,
in fact, a more enduring alliance between the two groups, and that is, in fact,
facilitated by a rightward shift on the part of mainstream feminists away from the
redistributive model of justice and simultaneously often leftward move of young evangelicals,
away from polarising issues such as gay rights and abortion,
towards a globally oriented social justice theology for which trafficking is the ideal poster child.
And when you think of militarised humanitarianism, I think, as the name suggests,
it refers to neocolonial humanitarian interventions in the Global South,
where undercover redistributive habilitation missions are used routinely by
Western anti-slavery crusaders to save Third World women from Third World men.
So this you know, this explanation for the enduring association between trafficking and sex work is quite compelling, I think.
What I'm interested in is if this complex alliance of social actors and ideologies,
do they actually some legitimacy from their international ventures?
What then sustains these projects abroad? So Bernstein, in her book, actually has a chapter on what she calls the troubles of trafficking.
And then she actually looks at reality tours, which are arranged by NGOs in Thailand.
And this is one of the places that she visits. And, you know, where Western tourists are taken to trafficking hotspots.
And certainly her description of the tools sound like the tools themselves are quite selective.
They're quite haphazardly organised in fact, and they put together with limited,
very limited interactions with local communities that actually deal with trafficking.
And there is definitely no interaction with sex worker rights groups.
Now while we can see how the hegemonic Western anti-trafficking discourse is reinforced by such charity tourism,
I argue that we need a fuller explanation for this economic and political edifice in the Global South that actually permits its perpetuation.
So in my view, I think we need a fuller account for the transnational limiting of Western anti-trafficking discourse.
And for this, I offer some insights using the Indian experience.
And although we don't have this the same kind of tourist linkages and trafficking reality tours in the Indian context,
I think it's worth exploring the resilient links and pathways of global
governmentality that anchor the sexual politics of anti-trafficking discourse today.
So before I speak specifically to the Indian context, I want to elaborate on my starting.
Points, which are slightly different from those of Bernstein. So I've been part of a recent collaborative project on governance, feminism read,
and we have a co-authored book which they refer to as well as a co-edited volume on governance, feminism with case studies from around the world.
And in this book on governance, feminism,
we actually noted several of the trends that Bernstein observes on the emergence of coastal feminism and the feminist turn to criminal law,
solutions to intractable problems of gender inequality.
However, we also found the concept of governance feminism to capture more fully the influence of feminists in
policy circles beyond criminal law initiatives and extending to reform in various other areas of the law,
including constitutional law, family law, law and development, corporate law and employment law.
Further, while coastal feminism captures the role of feminist visibly state policy,
I think governance feminism speaks more broadly to the influence of feminist beyond the state or,
you know, corridors of power to include that influence on institutions and even popular culture.
So I think capturing this dimension of feminist influence helps us assess the workings of Governmentality and how
even traditionally powerless groups like sex workers can also sometimes find pathways within these workings.
To every now and then exert influence in policy circles.
And I'll speak about this later in my paper.
I think what is also a point of departure from what Bernstein has written about is that in many contexts,
and this is certainly true of the Indian context, is that governance, feminism does not always emerge only from civil society.
In fact, the Indian state is a site for what it's referred to as state feminism.
So the Indian state in the 1970s,
in fact embraced the project of gender or gender equality by setting up a Department for Women and Child Development,
which is now a full fledged ministry alongside a National Commission for Women, as well as state commissions for women at the provincial levels.
And the role of these commissions, which are expert bodies on gender issues,
was that they often set the default policy on a given issue of gender inequality.
So we can think of this in terms of state feminism. So we need we need an extended vocabulary to look at good governance,
feminism and how it interacts with state feminism in producing the sexual politics of anti-trafficking discourse.
And I think I also want to add to the conversation in part of chatterjee's pieces on civil society, in political society,
which I think is quite useful in trying to understand the relationship between how Indian
feminists have lobbied for law reform and how sex workers have lobbied for law reform,
or rather fought back against these efforts. So they simply chatted.
He talks about how civil societies are restricted sphere within which, you know, elite citizens engage as rights bearers with the state.
But as political society is that heterogeneous population groups engage with the state in the realm of self-governance mentality.
So they may be engaged in various legal activities, which doesn't allow them to, in fact engage with the state as citizens,
but they are nevertheless crucial for maintaining the legitimacy of the post-colonial state.
And I think there's another point of departure from Bernstein thesis is the role of neoliberalism
and of late capitalism and what role they may play in sustaining anti-trafficking discourse.
And while it's true that the Indian state promotes neoliberal capitalist policies, I think the trajectory of how it's developed is quite different.
Namely, come out of Russia and she can speak very eloquently to this and I've drawn a lot from her work.
You find that it hasn't quite developed at the same pace and is faced with a social and political context that
does not let it advance uninterrupted and in fact often produces quite counter-intuitive configurations.
So for example, while Bernstein talks about the new Libyan capital policies which accompany a retreat of the welfare state in the Western context,
in fact, in the Indian context, the welfare state is growing rather than receding.
So this is an element of Bernstein's argument that doesn't quite relate directly to the maintenance of this hegemonic anti-trafficking discourse.
But there is another dimension of it where when we talk about a development approach to trafficking, maybe we could discuss further.
So what I want to do now is to set out actually some of the introduce to you
actually the key players in the Indian context who are active on on trafficking.
And one can think of two broad categories.
We have sex workers groups, and then we have groups that are not made up of sex workers, just to be very, very simplistic.
Now, sex workers groups in India draw on materialist feminist thinking and in conceptualising.
Sex work is a form of reproductive labour and they are organised in various ways as collectives,
as trade unions, as community based organisations, or simply NGOs that provide services to sex workers.
Now the non sex worker constituency, on the other hand, is quite varied.
It consists of feminists within the Indian women's movement. It consists of Marxism, Matilda's feminists.
It consists of anti-trafficking messengers who are radical, who espouse the radical feminist ideology.
And then you have anti-trafficking NGOs, which are not necessarily feminist.
And it's this interplay between these various actors that produces a certain version of anti-trafficking and discourse in the Indian context.
So, you know, I won't elaborate too much on what the Indian women's movement is, except that it's in the seventies and eighties.
It sought to be autonomous, both in a political sense from, you know,
leftist parties and also wanted to be financially independent from external and project based funding.
Now, what is interesting about the Indian women's movement is that it has crafted and indigenously
the radical materialist feminist politics on the issue of violence against women.
And this becomes important later, as I illustrate.
And the movement has actually heavily lobbied for statutory law reform in the areas of rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence.
But very interestingly, it has historically ignored the, quote unquote, prostitution question and consequently the issue of trafficking.
And I'll return to this later. Now, if you look at abolitionist NGOs, again, as I said, they could be feminist.
And an example of such a radical feminist abolitionist NGO is up north,
which claims to be influenced by Gandhian thought but is keen to abolish sex work through raids,
rescue and habilitation and importantly, the targeting of the mind.
So this is one of the things that really does has a lot in common with the coastal feminists that Bernstein alludes to and has over time.
And she hosted influential some feminists in India, such as Catherine macKinnon, Denis Raymond and Gloria Steinem,
who have repeatedly call on the government to adopt the Swedish model to eradicate sex work in India.
Now we have new abolitionists, NGOs who are not necessarily feminist, and these include NGOs like Pledge will prove Shakti by hand,
and importantly, a child labour group called Bachchan Bhutto Andolan, which is headed by Kailash Satyarthi, who won the Nobel Prize in 2014.
Now they're feminist credentials are not included, but they are opposed to sex,
but possibly persuaded by a cultural nationalist and a socially conservative politics which seeks to protect the dignity of Indian men,
women and children. And many of these NGOs have actually worked very closely with the UNODC,
and they are quite committed to a criminal crime controlled paradigm of trafficking.
So very much interested in Jade's risk.
And you have addition and, you know, keen to reiterate that in a country of India where there are millions of people who are extremely exploited,
that in fact, we should use the criminal law to target the worst forms of labour exploitation.
Now, I want to say little bit about the Indian trafficking policy landscape, which I think has a lot in common with other common law distinctions.
I won't go into the details of the laws on this absolutely necessary.
But, you know, most countries in the world have, you know,
a penal code or some sort of general body of criminal law which has anti-slavery and forced labour provisions like we do.
And then most countries also have an anti-sex work criminal law.
And in the Indian context, we had a law in 1956, which was later amended in 1986, but it fundamentally conflicts sex work and trafficking.
In addition, we have a range of labour laws actually, which very much dealt with what we would think of as trafficking today,
you know, and typically dealing with bonded labour or contractually by interstate migrant workers.
So often, you know, given the size of the country, you know, and the hundreds of millions of interstate migrants,
you'd often have migrants from a less developed part of the country.
Travelling to a more developed part of the country didn't speak.
The local language was paid far less than the local workers were and, you know, was basically duped into undertaking that work.
So we would call the trafficking today, but these labour laws did not think of them as trafficking,
but we can think of it as being as dealing with the social phenomenon of trafficking.
Now, so I'm going to start off from the 1950s.
As I already said, in the fifties, we had an anti-sex work criminal law, but sex workers resisted by constitutionally challenging.
Had very little success. And like most anti-sex work laws in the world, the anti-sex work rule does not criminalise the sale of sex pussy,
but actually criminalises all activities necessary in order to perform sex work.
And again, not surprisingly, it is used disproportionately to prosecute sex workers rather than exploitative stakeholders in sex markets.
So sex workers end up doing more sex work to pay off their fines.
The police also engage in extensive rent seeking behaviour through bribes.
And as a result, the the ITP, as it's called, or their Model Traffic Prevention Act,
undermines sex workers economic bargaining power within the sex sector.
Now, in the 1980s, so you had this law, but then in the 1980s, something changed for sex workers for the discovery of HIV.
There was a lot of HIV prevention funding which made its way into the developing world,
and this actually provided an impetus for sex workers to organise.
And so starting in the early 1990s, sex workers organise locally,
but very soon they came together in the form of the National Network of Sex Workers in 1997.
And what is very interesting is that sex workers groups did not litigate and they certainly did not mobilise to repeal the ITP.
Rather, their relationship with the state is best captured by one of the Calcutta based sex workers groups,
which used the metaphor of shield, not sports. When they thought of the law, they thought of it as a shield.
They saw the law as fundamentally ineffective in addressing their most pressing concerns, which was stigma and harassment by the police.
They instead negotiated with the state in political society.
And so they would often fashion themselves as day labourers,
as needful as people living below the poverty line and as workers in the unorganised sector.
Because these were the various areas in which the Indian state had actually provided welfare policies for various population groups.
And alongside this, since the mid 1990s, as I've already mentioned, we have institutions of state feminism.
So we had the National Commission for Women and one of its very first tasks was to produce a position paper on sex work.
And so very early on, the National Commission actually was committed to abolishing sex books.
And this then became the Indian state's default policy on sex work.
But actually, there wasn't any move to amend the ATP. Instead, there was some public interest litigation by Supreme Court lawyers,
and there's some halfhearted attempt on the part of the state to produce a plan of action which again treated sex workers as,
quote unquote, economically weaker sections of society.
So to give benefits such as housing, health and education, but really did not broach the question of decriminalisation,
decriminalisation or protecting sex workers from prosecution under the ATP.
Now, frustrated by this lack of legislative action, a lot of the new abolitionist NGOs, like fraudulent activity,
then undertook public interest litigation and they were assisted in this by liberal look a stand out requirements.
And so they began to demand prosecution of traffickers. They wanted a victims protection protocol.
They wanted better conditions and habilitation homes and in rescue homes.
And so what happens is you begin to see these public interest losses emerge all over the country.
They soon became repeat players before the Supreme Court and the Delhi Bombay High Courts and
courts began to respond by directing the executive to formulate plans for rehabilitation.
Very well-meaning. But what what happened here was that in the process,
this facilitated partnership between new abolitionist NGOs and the police on the ground in data desk operations.
So we find that these early petitions actually laid the foundation for continuous monitoring of the executive by courts for over a decade.
And this led, in turn, to the creation of several expert advisory bodies.
Now, of course, internationally, we find that with the adoption of the Palermo Protocol in 2000 and the release of the US Step reports,
India begins initially, does well under the TTIP reports, but in 2004 it is downgraded to a tier two watch list.
And then you become you are at risk for losing aid from the US government.
And it was in response to this degrading 2000 crore that the Department for Women and
Child Development proposed to amend the ITP to criminalise customers of sex workers.
In effect, you know, operationalising the Swedish model.
But interestingly, the bill was defeated because of disagreements within the union cabinet.
And this is where I think we find simultaneous flows of international funding for HIV prevention on the one hand,
but also for abolitionist activities.
So what really happens is that the Health Minister disagrees with the Home Minister on adopting the Swedish model
and is worried about the negative effects that the Swedish model might actually have on HIV prevention projects.
So in 2005, this Swedish model is warded off, but we find.
A whole new set of new abolitionists and NGOs who find actually the litigation to be a very useful strategy.
So we find out, play up and much fun. But I wonder underline also then setting up,
assisting the executive in setting up various specialist agencies and they become very heavily involved in drafting or creating protocols,
you know, when rescuing and rehabilitating trafficked persons.
So what this means is that over time, this the executive came to rely heavily on these very endures as experts on
trafficking so that whenever the state acquired assistance in drafting a new law,
they drew on the expertise of this NGO. So what we find is this the state is so governmental that actually becomes an open site.
It's very porous to the influence of new abolitionist NGOs.
And of course, then what happened was that in 2012, when the rape and murder of Jyoti Pandey happened in Delhi,
these abolitionist groups actually found an opportunity for lobbying on trafficking.
So what is fascinating is that the second longest chapter in the Burma Committee report, which is appointed after her murder,
the longest chapter in the committee report after reports on trafficking, which is extraordinary,
really, because, you know, trafficking was never on the horizon for the Indian women's movement.
So it was quite surprising to find that in the report.
And the committee very interestingly recommended an anti-trafficking offence that was actually modelled on the Palermo protocol,
but which conflated sex work, quality sex work with trafficking.
And this was welcomed by Bitcoin.
But I underline and perhaps and ironically Indian feminist groups, because in fact,
they were quite they were caught on the wrong foot when it came to the issue of trafficking.
And it was only when sex workers groups, especially the National Network for Sex Workers,
protested that there were more committed will do this particular recommendation.
And we then had a standalone trafficking offence in the Indian Penal Code, which simply mirrored the Palermo Protocol definition of trafficking.
Now, on the heels of this reform, what we find is one of the public interest lawsuits which had been filed almost a decade ago,
comes alive in the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court dismisses that on the assurance of the Ministry of Women and Child
Development that they will actually draft a comprehensive legislation on trafficking.
And so this then led to the introduction of the trafficking bill, which was passed in the Lower House of Parliament in July 2018,
but has since lapsed because it wasn't presented before the Upper House of Parliament.
Now there couldn't be a better statement or better channelling of new abolitionist thinking on trafficking than the 2018 trafficking bill.
So ignoring a very long history of dealing with trafficking through labour law and in fact,
the 2018 trafficking bill is a draconian piece of legislation.
It intent was a classic religious duty rehabilitation model, and it has a criminal law system that has stringent penalties,
reverses a burden of proof for fighting traffickers assets, and an extensive surveillance machinery that's meant to prevent trafficking.
And it has various aggravated trafficking offences that then extends to bonded labour, forced labour marriage, begging and so on.
So these are all forms of exploitation which are not listed in the trafficking protocol,
but many countries have actually expanded the remit of trafficking and these offences are cognisable a non-bailable.
And it's quite perplexing that the bill focus on focuses on just going to
habilitation because existing homes have historically proven to be ineffective.
And in fact last year there was there's a scandal around these shelter homes all over the country where
children were found to be sexually abused by the very people who ran these homes in Muzaffarpur.
And this has now led to a whole investigation around shelter homes all over the country.
And in fact, all the expert state commissions on women have have actually expressed their disgust for these shelter homes in nothing but,
you know, brothels by another name. Nevertheless, the bill focuses on setting up or using existing shelter homes.
Most importantly, the bill does not repeal the anti-sex work law, nor does it deal with any of the other labour laws on bonded labour.
So the relationship between these various laws is quite unclear.
What is interesting is that it uses many of the techniques in the ITP, such as, you know, which would I developed in the context of sex work,
such as raids, rescues, and you have in addition, but also shutting down brothels, you know, which is there are provisions in the idea for it.
It simply transports them to all the other sectors of work.
So in the context of bonded labour, it actually one could imagine a workplace sort of factory being shut down because the.
A model is being used in the proposed trafficking bill.
So the letter and spirit of labour laws are entirely missing in the boot, which really only channels the ITP.
So how does one begin to analyse, you know, these decades of lobbying for and Indian anti-trafficking legislation?
So I want to reflect a bit on what the various stakeholders did in this context and to qualify some of the
other assertions that Bernstein makes about the the continuing focus on sex work in anti-trafficking discourse.
So the first issue around coastal feminism or governance feminism.
Now, it is actually true that feminists within the Indian women's movement have increasingly relied on criminal law.
And in you know, in the book that I mentioned on governance, feminism,
I have a chapter there which actually maps how Indian feminists of the past 35 years, in fact, in the context of flow reform,
have relied increasingly on criminal law, how they become deeply committed to a highly gendered reading of sexual violence,
and how they have a diluted oppositional stance. Missouri State Power.
So, you know, if you think of women's movements being outside of movements with protest rallies and so on,
this wasn't the case in the lead up to the reply often.
In fact, feminist would a crucial part of the lawmaking process and several provisions on rape law, in fact, came from feminist demands.
And the state, in fact, was also receptive to many feminist ideas.
Interestingly, whole. On the question of trafficking in sex work, there was already intense feminist polarisation on this question.
And because I argue that Indian feminists within the women's movement were materialist feminists, they were quite ambivalent about sex work.
And so it's a it's a deep ambivalence.
I think it's informed by a radical feminist resistance to the promotion of
the rights of sex workers because they actually view a sex book as a burden.
At the same time, they're materialist feminist.
So they remember that actually these women are in the grip of capitalist patriarchy and therefore they have very constrained livelihood options.
Therefore, they refrain from reaching out for the criminal law to abolish sex work.
Unlike, say, American radical feminists who have spearheaded end demand campaigns despite the adverse consequences this has to sex workers.
And so the reluctance to engage on the question of sex worker trafficking produced a vacuum in the policy space,
which was then occupied by new abolitionists and Jews.
But interestingly, the feminists in the women's movement did lend sex worker groups their support when they wanted to.
They wanted the Burma committee to strike back on their conflation between sex work and trafficking.
And this is quite interesting because I think this ambivalence allowed them to develop, you know,
empathy for sex workers demands rather than have a very rigid, moralistic response to the question of sex work.
Now, the vacuum created by the Indian women's movement was filled rapidly, as shown by new abolitionists, NGOs.
And these issues interacted with the state in various spheres.
So they engaged with the state through litigation. They collaborated outside the courtroom at the micro-level with local state functionaries,
including the police, district magistrates, anti-human trafficking units and children's welfare committees.
They participated in expert bodies. So literally every expert body that the government has set up on trafficking in sex work,
you will find abolitionists and just the very same abolitionists and just repeatedly featuring on these expert bodies.
So they not only petitioned the state, but they also work alongside the state and within the state.
So one could really think of them as occupying the lead singer of civil society in Saturday's terms.
And I mean, and this is not you know, there have been fissures in this alliance between the radical feminist groups and some of the conservative NGOs,
especially once the leader of the Bataclan. But I recently spoke at an Oasis rally.
But it's not that she has not really fully become explicit, but it is a very uneasy alliance.
Now, thinking about sex focus groups. So initially, you know, as as as I already mentioned, sex workers have always experienced data as abusive.
So then feminists were arguing for more criminal law to deal with the problem of violence for sex workers.
The law itself was the problem. So they were never really the law wasn't a default option for the lobby.
And in fact, in protest marches, for instance, in 2005 against the amendment to the ITP,
the MSI routinely enacted a gallows scene where the news of the ATP was shown as being around the neck of a sex worker who was just as a prisoner.
So this is really their orientation towards the law. So they they did not litigate, you know, they didn't really resort to it.
And as I've already shown, they really operated in.
Political society, and it was very unclear what effects their lobbying would actually have because they've been at the receiving end of,
you know, the brutal violence of the police. But they were also exposed to the state's softer, discursive power through HIV prevention projects.
So either way, they were quite reluctant to rely on the law.
And so in 2005, they managed to avert the Swedish model simply because they were you know,
they were promoting safe sex through HIV prevention programs.
And if they were criminalised or their customers were criminalised, this projects would go nowhere.
And in 2013, they had to align with feminists from the Indian women's movement to really pressure the Obama committee.
So but what has happened is, interestingly, they have also grown in stature and in influence.
So in 2018, when the trafficking bill was proposed, one element of the sex workers movement actually reached out to a prominent opposition MP.
She wrote to directly lobbied the Minister Maneka Gandhi.
And so this had quite mixed results actually, but it's testament to their growing influence.
So we find that these alliances between civil society and political society are
possible and sex workers groups would fluidly move between the two of them.
But just as they became closer to centres of power, it seemed that they had also lost some of the edge of the protest politics from a decade before.
So in 2008 they had protest rallies all over the country even they had a protest rally in Parliament,
whereas this time around we didn't find protest rallies. And in fact the impetus for public mobilisation came from the transgender rights movement
because at the same time that the trafficking bill was being presented in Parliament,
a transgender rights bill was also produced, and transgender groups rallied both against the trafficking bill, as well as the transgender bill.
So so, you know, so it's quite interesting to see how these various constituencies have influenced the policy making process.
And on the face of it, if we go back to the state feminists or to the rulers, which is the government,
it's easy to dismiss the passage of the trafficking bill in the Lower House as simply a show of strength for the abolitionists,
because after every influential Indian abolitionist had the ear of the minister and the opening statement of the minister
in Parliament when she introduced the bill referred explicitly to cases of sexually brutalised women and children.
But what is interesting is that if you look at the media statements leading up to the passage of the bill and soon after,
one finds certain pragmatic concessions that the minister made to sex workers in the interests of diffusing their objections to its passage.
So this, again, is a testament to sex workers power. So I'll just give you a few examples.
So in here I'm analysing the debates in Parliament over the trafficking, but so when she goes to criticise,
he channel the criticism of the sex workers groups against the trafficking bill.
The Minister, in response to him, assured the House that voluntary sex work would not be affected by the bill.
So she claimed that sex workers were invariably penalised, but as traffickers were not,
that in fact, the bill adopted a compassionate view of people who had become victims in the sex.
So I quote Yes. So she says in parliament, absolutely.
There is no question of harassing them. The bill focuses on a victim.
If a voluntary sex worker is not a victim, has not been trafficked, has no one to blame for his or her problem or other ones like transgenders,
then there is no question of my harassing them or the police having anything to do with them.
The bill is not intended to facilitate or to harass sex workers,
and we find that another ruling party MP who also responded to Toad was more explicit in her condemnation of voluntary sex work.
And so she actually talked about how no one would enter sex work if they had a choice,
and none of us would want our children to actually become sex workers.
So she was categorical that sex work would not be a profession. And so it's interesting.
That is a dialogue between these two women in parliament.
And the minister then derives on the other end piece comments and then says actually
the only way to help women is to crack down on organised crime in red light areas.
So it's this very ambivalent position of going back and forth on the question of one quality sex workers.
And so it's clear that the position of the government was to support the sex worker, but not the sex industry itself.
And a few days later, which is again, very unusual, the minister wrote an op ed in a leading newspaper and again clarified that,
in fact, voluntary sex work would not be affected by the trafficking bill.
But but that, in fact, the trafficking bill was giving sex workers the option for rehabilitation if she wished to discontinue sex work.
And she urged sex workers groups to to recognise the value of this choice in the lives of the people that they work so hard to do.
And so and this this thread of trying to say that, in fact, the trafficking bill doesn't deal with quality sex work,
but at the same time, rehabilitation is a right that's present provided by the trafficking bill reiterates itself.
So in another similar op ed by an abolitionist, there is some concession to the fact that, in fact, women may have some agency.
But really, this this commentator argued an abolitionist commentator argued that a sex worker may have some agency,
but actually she's suffering under false consciousness.
So you see some of the radical feminists object, you know, critiques of or objections to sex worker agency being rehearsed in these debates.
So what is interesting about these arguments is that they are not novel in any way.
I think pragmatically it's quite clear that it's the growing influence of sex workers,
influence that the abolitionists and the government is trying to push back on.
But in fact, the position of the minister is a position that's quite there's a long lineage to it in the Indian context.
So even when the anti-sex work law was passed in the 1950s,
it was in fact drafted by women from the nationalist movement who all along understood that they couldn't in fact criminalise the
sex worker who was a victim of economic circumstance and whose freedom of occupation was actually protected by the Constitution.
Instead, they never focussed on finalisation, they always focussed on the habilitation.
And so this paternalistic politics of elite feminists actually continues today.
So what is interesting about this feminist argument is that it tries to produce what I call the middle ground feminist position.
And it's not confined to Indian feminist. Feminists all over the world actually have tried to, you know,
argue that you have to embrace the contradiction of abolishing the system while empowering the practice of supporting the right of sex workers,
rights of sex workers, but not the right to sex work of supporting the empowering practices of individual sex workers.
But being against institutional prostitution itself.
So, you know, there is there is this sort of contradictory hybrid position that has long been prevalent in feminist politics,
which the state feminists in the Indian context were simply channelling.
So what is problematic about this middle ground feminist position that it actually is impossible to operationalise in policy terms?
Because how can one detract from the commercial aspect of the sex sector without hurting sex workers in sense?
And how does one respect the rights of sex workers without indirectly supporting the system of sex work?
So actually it's quite impossible to reconcile these two positions.
And I think this is why there is a slippage between the statements of the minister and her more obviously abolitionist counterpart,
the MP in Parliament.
Now, this is the this is the only explanations through which we can see that both statements are consistent and in a more technical sense,
a legalistic sense is quite what is interesting about the anti-trafficking bill is that there's a displacement of attention from the anti-trafficking,
from the anti-sex book law. So the focus is on the trafficking bill rather than the sex work law.
So there are no assurances by the minister that in fact the idea will be repeated.
Instead, there is simply reference to a standard non-accidental clause which says where there is conflict between two provisions,
between two laws, the trafficking bill will trump the IGP.
But that's not really adequate assurances for for sex workers.
So I just conclude by reflecting briefly on this relationship between the international and the domestic,
because I think it's often assumed that there is a unidimensional or a soft power from international policy developments to the domestic level.
And to some extent, it is true because, you know, obligations to enact anti-trafficking laws come from signing on to the trafficking protocol.
And I've also shown how the TTIP reports, in fact, almost too good a Swedish model in this context.
And over time, as international opinion broadened understanding of trafficking to go beyond sex trafficking,
the Indian government pursued the same position. So in 2013, the standalone offence of trafficking actually is not restricted just to prostitution.
It refers to other sectors as well. So there is some way in which, yes,
domestic jurisdiction stick from the international domain and one has to always
acknowledge the linkages fostered by what I think Gupta calls global governmentality,
whereby both domestic and international students, civil society players,
often interact with each other and with their counterparts from other countries and spaces of what Salima calls transnational modernity.
They tend to often derive legitimation from each other. So when the two UN special approaches and trafficking.
Contemporary Forms of slavery criticised the 2018 trafficking bill.
In fact, the Minister said, well, you know, in fact when they presented the trafficking bill at a child labour conference in Argentina,
many governments wanted to emulate the Indian model.
So there's a way in which international governments, you know, influence what's happening domestically, but also the other way around.
And but also the soft power, which is exercised by the international community, has not always been well received by the Indian government.
So I think India, Brazil, many of these countries are similar in that sense.
So for example, the government of India has long resented the tip ranking system and refuses to,
you know, fill out questionnaires circulated by the US government.
It has also vigorously protested the lifting of trafficking in terms of modern slavery and in fact has denied visas
to researchers from the Work Free Foundation when they came to India to to produce the 2018 Global Slavery Index.
But what is interesting is, for the most part, some of the most significant shifts in policy are often triggered by domestic developments.
So so, for instance, the rape and murder duty finding was a domestic political opportunity.
Similarly, once Section 370 was passed and you had a trafficking offence, it was a public interest law.
So that really triggered the creation of a new trafficking bill.
So what I want to argue is that political opportunity stripped a political opportunity structures that isn't a cheap local.
And in fact, unlike in the West, trafficking in the Indian context has has not captured the imagination of the Indian public.
And this has to do. So trafficking is a very niche issue in the policy sphere, which doesn't attract the same kind of attention that other issues do.
So the relationship between the international and the national is quite a delicate dance and it's quite contingent rather than being determinative.
So I want to conclude by by just saying that anti-trafficking discourse has morphed considerably over the past 20 years,
with the term trafficking managing to do considerable work in holding together quite disparate costs and projects together.
And it could be it could be a reference peripheral for, you know, global supply chains.
It could be something to deal with forced marriage.
It could be used to discuss sex trafficking.
And the diet on the sexual politics, however, has moved, but far less compared to other issues of labour exploitation.
And in the case of India, there's been some limited expansion of this understanding of trafficking to include bonded labour.
However, the cost to the imagination of the ITP is has been channelled through the new trafficking bill,
alongside of also neglect on the part of the state to a very rich jurisprudence around forced labour and bonded labour.
And there is a politics of avoidance, CO2, labour exploitation.
But that is something that I'm happy to to explain in the course of of.