1 00:00:01,230 --> 00:00:03,840 So thank you all for coming to that last. 2 00:00:03,870 --> 00:00:11,310 Also coming out of the church, especially those of you who are messy students, freaking out about your Facebook keystroke. 3 00:00:11,340 --> 00:00:17,700 It's my pleasure to welcome proper Coach Suarez and his professor of law and social justice at King's College London. 4 00:00:18,600 --> 00:00:23,760 Her main areas of research include criminal law, transnational criminal law, sociology of law, 5 00:00:24,840 --> 00:00:29,700 postcolonial theory, a feminist legal theory, and probably written a number of books, 6 00:00:29,700 --> 00:00:38,160 including Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labour, about sex work in the Law in India, and has a new book out this year called Governance Feminism. 7 00:00:39,870 --> 00:00:45,630 Her work has been recognised by a number of prizes and awards and has been funded by a range of international research councils. 8 00:00:46,020 --> 00:00:53,100 And currently she's heading a large European Research Council grant on the laws of social production until March 29, 9 00:00:53,220 --> 00:01:00,720 when we are all here today to talk to us about sexual politics of anti-trafficking discourse. 10 00:01:01,390 --> 00:01:05,549 Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for your kind introduction. 11 00:01:05,550 --> 00:01:09,720 Can you hear me on the back? Yeah. Okay, great. So thank you all for being here. 12 00:01:10,410 --> 00:01:17,010 And the weather has kept up with us. So my talk today is titled The Sexual Politics of Anti-Trafficking Discourse. 13 00:01:17,610 --> 00:01:23,670 And the goal of the paper is actually to revisit the contentious history of the sexual politics, of anti-trafficking discourse, 14 00:01:24,090 --> 00:01:30,240 and to take stock of how it has evolved since the earliest point at which feminists influenced it in the 1990s. 15 00:01:30,900 --> 00:01:37,920 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. 16 00:01:38,550 --> 00:01:42,810 And I think it's fair to say that the anti-trafficking field has gone from an early, 17 00:01:43,110 --> 00:01:49,950 almost exclusive preoccupation of trafficking with sex work to now addressing exploitation in various labour sectors. 18 00:01:50,970 --> 00:01:58,410 So this might suggest you to just focus on the nature of the work performed with agree and then a greater 19 00:01:58,410 --> 00:02:04,440 focus on the conditions under which the labours perform so that all forms of extreme labour exploitation, 20 00:02:04,440 --> 00:02:09,750 but then sex work or fishing or cotton cultivation would actually attract the application of anti-trafficking law. 21 00:02:11,220 --> 00:02:15,240 So the questions that I pose in this paper are as follows. 22 00:02:15,250 --> 00:02:18,870 So almost 20 years since the Palermo Protocol on trafficking was adopted, 23 00:02:19,290 --> 00:02:26,639 I ask whether the broadening of the legal parameters of trafficking to various sectors has in fact meant that, 24 00:02:26,640 --> 00:02:30,870 legally speaking, trafficking is no longer conflated with trafficking for sex work? 25 00:02:31,110 --> 00:02:33,300 Or would sex and sex work itself? 26 00:02:34,290 --> 00:02:40,570 Secondly, even if legally there is a delinking between trafficking and sex work, does it translate into practices on the ground? 27 00:02:40,590 --> 00:02:43,770 In other words, are sex workers harassed less than they were before? 28 00:02:45,180 --> 00:02:51,150 I'm also interested in what this means for feminist theorising on sex work and feminist mobilising on trafficking. 29 00:02:52,080 --> 00:02:55,950 And I want to ask what it has meant for sex workers themselves in terms of how they understand 30 00:02:55,950 --> 00:03:00,150 trafficking and how they have lobbied vis a vis the state on anti-trafficking law. 31 00:03:01,020 --> 00:03:08,069 Importantly, I'm curious to find out what it has meant for proposals for redistribution within the sex sector to minimise, 32 00:03:08,070 --> 00:03:15,540 if not eliminate the exploitation of sex workers. And I'm also interested in asking what the sexual politics of anti-trafficking discourse 33 00:03:15,540 --> 00:03:20,280 tells us about the post-colonial state and the terrains on which feminist sex workers, 34 00:03:20,460 --> 00:03:25,230 conservative and left progressive movements, engage both with each other as well as with the state, 35 00:03:25,770 --> 00:03:28,950 and what alliances are made and where do we find success. 36 00:03:28,950 --> 00:03:31,920 And these alliances failed to materialise and why. 37 00:03:33,300 --> 00:03:40,770 And specifically in the context of the developing world, I'm curious to interrogate the relationship between the international and the domestic, 38 00:03:41,010 --> 00:03:46,920 because there is often an assumption that domestically the change is largely influenced by developments in the international arena. 39 00:03:47,400 --> 00:03:51,720 And I'm curious if this is the case and if not, what really drives policy change? 40 00:03:52,230 --> 00:03:55,710 So these are some of the questions that I want to address today. 41 00:03:56,160 --> 00:04:03,570 And in doing so, I'm inspired by Elizabeth Bernstein's new book called Broken Subjects Sex Trafficking and the Politics of Freedom, 42 00:04:04,080 --> 00:04:07,170 where she undertakes what she calls an ethnography of discourse. 43 00:04:08,100 --> 00:04:11,400 And she understands discourses to mean a constellation of words, 44 00:04:11,670 --> 00:04:16,470 realities and practices as they coalesce in historically and culturally situated base, 45 00:04:16,800 --> 00:04:21,990 constructing the empirical object under consideration and the social locations in which it is manifest. 46 00:04:22,470 --> 00:04:26,880 So according to her, it's not merely a reference to language as separate from the real world, 47 00:04:27,360 --> 00:04:30,360 but is organise sets of signifying practices that bridge both. 48 00:04:31,470 --> 00:04:36,510 And although I did not actually set out to systematically study anti-trafficking stakeholders in 49 00:04:36,510 --> 00:04:42,419 the way that Bernstein does in her superb ethnography as a feminist scholar of sex work in India, 50 00:04:42,420 --> 00:04:45,330 I've actually tracked anti-trafficking policy for several years, 51 00:04:45,930 --> 00:04:52,409 and in the past three years I've increasingly embraced an academic activist role in mobilising labour groups, 52 00:04:52,410 --> 00:04:59,880 as well as trade unions to engage with the issue of trafficking and also lobby members of Parliament with a multi-sector. 53 00:05:00,140 --> 00:05:07,280 Critic of Indian governments, trafficking of persons. And actually preparing for this talk has given me an opportunity to reflect on some of 54 00:05:07,280 --> 00:05:12,620 these struggles and the shifts in discourse that I have witnessed at close quarters. 55 00:05:13,430 --> 00:05:21,050 Am I going too fast or so quick? So I'll say a little bit here about the anti-trafficking transnational order. 56 00:05:22,050 --> 00:05:27,320 Now, sexual politics has been called to the framing of anti-trafficking law and policy since the 1900s. 57 00:05:28,040 --> 00:05:33,140 But today I'll speak only to the most recent wave of legislative activity around this issue. 58 00:05:33,710 --> 00:05:39,710 So and some of this you may already be quite familiar with, so I'll try to go through it briefly. 59 00:05:40,250 --> 00:05:47,060 So as you may know, since the late 1990s, there's an extensive transnational legal order that has developed to deal with trafficking. 60 00:05:47,420 --> 00:05:53,730 And it's built around the 2000 U.N. protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children. 61 00:05:53,750 --> 00:05:55,610 It's often referred to as the Palermo Protocol, 62 00:05:56,240 --> 00:06:02,810 and it supplements the U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime, which was also adopted in 2000. 63 00:06:03,260 --> 00:06:09,170 Now the protocol was negotiated within two years, quote unquote, at lightning speed on the UN block. 64 00:06:09,260 --> 00:06:11,590 This is according to Simmons and Lloyd. 65 00:06:12,590 --> 00:06:21,710 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. 66 00:06:22,460 --> 00:06:26,570 Now, if you look at the development of this transnational legal order over the past 18 years, 67 00:06:26,570 --> 00:06:31,250 you can discern at least three phases, a phase between 2000 and 2009, 68 00:06:31,820 --> 00:06:40,220 which was the heyday of sex work exceptionalism, a phase between 2009 and 2014 when close attention was paid to labour trafficking. 69 00:06:40,580 --> 00:06:44,090 Then the invisible, the competing streams of modern slavery and forced labour. 70 00:06:44,600 --> 00:06:50,750 And from 2014, when legal interventions were framed explicitly in terms of slavery and forced labour, 71 00:06:51,080 --> 00:06:54,430 and this began to be enacted at the national as well as international levels. 72 00:06:55,220 --> 00:07:04,250 Now, if you look at the first phase between 2000 2009, it is a period characterised by what I call textbook exceptionalism. 73 00:07:04,760 --> 00:07:08,000 So as we know, trafficking has long been associated with prostitution. 74 00:07:08,320 --> 00:07:14,840 Hence, there was no surprise that the existing sex work legal order emerging from the 1950 UN Convention for the 75 00:07:14,840 --> 00:07:19,850 Suppression of the Trafficking in Persons actually casts a long shadow over the anti-trafficking regime. 76 00:07:20,660 --> 00:07:26,690 So and this has been well documented that associated actors, both governmental and non-governmental, 77 00:07:26,930 --> 00:07:34,250 disagreed fundamentally and along ideological lines on the normative status of sex work and therefore the remit of the crime of trafficking. 78 00:07:34,910 --> 00:07:42,620 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. 79 00:07:42,920 --> 00:07:45,830 And they played a crucial role in negotiating the protocol itself. 80 00:07:46,460 --> 00:07:55,520 And we can find traces of new abolitionists instruments on the protocol in the very definition of trafficking under Article three of the protocol. 81 00:07:56,060 --> 00:08:03,220 So, for example, Article three of the protocol, which defines trafficking, lists a list several means through which trafficking can be accomplished. 82 00:08:03,230 --> 00:08:08,510 And one of these means is a term that is quite unheard of in legal systems around the world. 83 00:08:08,930 --> 00:08:12,860 And this phrase is the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability. 84 00:08:13,490 --> 00:08:19,610 And the the idea of inserting this phrase commonly to say in the protocol, 85 00:08:19,970 --> 00:08:24,230 was to ensure that even women who entered into voluntary sex work would somehow 86 00:08:24,380 --> 00:08:28,370 be brought within this more structured understanding of what vulnerability is. 87 00:08:29,660 --> 00:08:34,760 Similarly, the Article three clarifies that the consent of the victim to exploitation is immaterial. 88 00:08:35,030 --> 00:08:37,340 Some of the means listed in Article three are used, 89 00:08:37,910 --> 00:08:45,710 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. 90 00:08:46,370 --> 00:08:53,480 So we find that in the initial years of the trafficking protocol, trafficking was invariably conflated with sex trafficking and with sex work. 91 00:08:54,050 --> 00:08:57,770 And so I term this development, sex work exceptionalism, 92 00:08:57,770 --> 00:09:04,520 by which I mean the characterisation by abolitionist groups who modelled themselves after 18th century abolitionists of simply like 93 00:09:04,520 --> 00:09:13,280 William Wilberforce of the sale of sex for money as an egregious violation of human dignity and is exceptionally harmful for women. 94 00:09:13,730 --> 00:09:18,650 And second, the overwhelming association of trafficking with trafficking for sex work and sex work, etc. 95 00:09:19,220 --> 00:09:26,150 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, 96 00:09:27,020 --> 00:09:31,880 primarily during the time that the Bush administration was in power, where the US government, 97 00:09:32,810 --> 00:09:38,660 which was keen to abolish the sex industry, named and shamed countries through the Trafficking in Persons report that's issued 98 00:09:38,660 --> 00:09:42,920 every year in June under the Trafficking of Victims and Protection Act of 2000. 99 00:09:43,430 --> 00:09:45,440 So this had ripple effects across the world. 100 00:09:45,440 --> 00:09:52,460 The countries were compelled to specifically target prostitution in their anti-trafficking laws as a way of moving up the TTIP report rankings. 101 00:09:53,090 --> 00:09:59,480 Now Western states that's used anti-trafficking policy for kerbing sex work and for border control purposes while emerging. 102 00:09:59,850 --> 00:10:06,959 Such as Brazil, China and India actually narrowly construed trafficking as trafficking for sex work precisely 103 00:10:06,960 --> 00:10:11,580 because they wanted to deflect attention from their vast domestic problem of labour trafficking. 104 00:10:12,360 --> 00:10:20,490 So according to commentators, a robust sex panic accompanied this first phase of the development of the trafficking legal order. 105 00:10:20,820 --> 00:10:25,469 And this has been extensively documented by feminists, both in relation to its historical antecedent, 106 00:10:25,470 --> 00:10:29,640 which is the anti white slavery campaigns at the turn of the 20th century, 107 00:10:30,090 --> 00:10:34,379 and its contemporary use to allay fears about globalisation through a yearning for a 108 00:10:34,380 --> 00:10:38,880 familiar race and gender order that in women's migration was thought to be discouraged. 109 00:10:39,660 --> 00:10:46,650 Now, in the second phase, with a change of administration in the US, what we find is some 29. 110 00:10:47,250 --> 00:10:49,440 The US State Department, in its own move to pivot, 111 00:10:49,440 --> 00:10:55,020 begins to focus on labour trafficking in place of its previous sordid preoccupation with sex trafficking and sex work. 112 00:10:55,590 --> 00:10:59,610 And we find the combination of the waning of an exclusive emphasis on sex work, 113 00:10:59,610 --> 00:11:03,090 along with increased visibility of the international labour organisations. 114 00:11:03,300 --> 00:11:09,360 Interventions on forced labour meant that there was a there was new thinking around the scope of anti-trafficking law. 115 00:11:10,110 --> 00:11:16,349 We find critics of the anti-trafficking framework putting forward what they call the labour paradigm of trafficking and anti-trafficking laws, 116 00:11:16,350 --> 00:11:22,590 which earlier defined trafficking purely in terms of sex trafficking now being defined more broadly to cover labour trafficking as this. 117 00:11:23,940 --> 00:11:30,180 Now, from around 2012, we find that trafficking became increasingly reframed in terms of both slavery and forced labour. 118 00:11:30,540 --> 00:11:35,999 And as we all know, a new term was coined by Nottingham sociologist. 119 00:11:36,000 --> 00:11:39,360 He was at Holden, Kevin Beers, namely modern slavery. 120 00:11:39,930 --> 00:11:42,480 And the definition of modern slavery has varied over time. 121 00:11:42,810 --> 00:11:49,680 But the latest iteration is that it's an umbrella term which covers various phenomena, including trafficking, 122 00:11:49,680 --> 00:11:53,970 forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage and the sale and exploitation of children. 123 00:11:54,690 --> 00:12:01,469 So this idea of modern slavery, which actually has no definition and international law, found purchased with several governments. 124 00:12:01,470 --> 00:12:06,840 And so the UK passed the Modern Slavery Act in 2015 and there are several other countries 125 00:12:06,840 --> 00:12:11,310 which have either passed a similar law or are contemplating a modern slavery legislation. 126 00:12:12,390 --> 00:12:13,469 And again, as you may know, 127 00:12:13,470 --> 00:12:23,730 the Walkley Foundation then took this idea of modern slavery and it's founded by an Australian mining magnate and philanthropist Andrew Forrest, 128 00:12:24,030 --> 00:12:31,140 who then produced the Global Slavery Index in 2013 and then subsequently in 2014, 16 and 80. 129 00:12:31,560 --> 00:12:37,320 And so much like the TTIP reports, it really ranks countries in terms of their modern slavery problem. 130 00:12:38,220 --> 00:12:42,510 And we also find that influenced by the California Transparency in Supply 131 00:12:42,510 --> 00:12:46,950 Chains Act and the Supply Chain Transparency Clause in the Modern Slavery Act. 132 00:12:46,950 --> 00:12:52,320 Several governments are now targeting forced labour in global supply and commodity chains. 133 00:12:52,980 --> 00:12:56,160 Now, alongside this focus on modern slavery, 134 00:12:56,160 --> 00:13:01,410 we find the ILO is staking a claim to leadership in this area by releasing several reports 135 00:13:01,410 --> 00:13:07,080 on forced labour starting in 2005 and also updating its forcible convention of 1930, 136 00:13:07,410 --> 00:13:14,820 which primarily focussed on forced labour used by governments. So we have a 2014 protocol to the forcible convention. 137 00:13:15,450 --> 00:13:23,669 However, the definition of relationship between trafficking and forced labour is quite unsettled and there has been a fair 138 00:13:23,670 --> 00:13:29,880 bit of contestation around whether forced labour is the umbrella term or whether trafficking is the umbrella term. 139 00:13:30,180 --> 00:13:35,130 In other words, is trafficking a subset of forced labour or this forcible subset of trafficking? 140 00:13:35,700 --> 00:13:37,280 And so this wasn't enough. 141 00:13:37,290 --> 00:13:46,770 The ILO, in its attempt to both exist through, you know, funding from foundations and governments, but also to remain relevant on this issue, 142 00:13:47,070 --> 00:13:53,670 has recently joined hands with the Walk Through Foundation to produce a global estimates of modern slavery in 2017. 143 00:13:53,670 --> 00:14:01,770 So again, this is complicated the field furthermore, because the umbrella to modern slavery now includes trafficking in forced labour. 144 00:14:02,340 --> 00:14:05,219 Now why do these definitions matter? Like they matter? 145 00:14:05,220 --> 00:14:13,500 Because they make certain presumptions about what trafficking actually is, and they tend to also reflect preferred regulatory pathways. 146 00:14:14,130 --> 00:14:22,950 So this is a very sort of simplistic portrayal of what these main approaches to trafficking are, but one can discern roughly three approaches. 147 00:14:23,640 --> 00:14:25,379 One is the criminal justice approach, 148 00:14:25,380 --> 00:14:33,690 where trafficking is viewed as an exceptional aberration to otherwise normal circuits of commerce and exchange in a globalised world, 149 00:14:34,050 --> 00:14:41,340 thus warranting the corrective hand of the criminal law. We then have the human rights approach, which stays within the criminal law paradigm, 150 00:14:41,340 --> 00:14:48,090 but it simply seeks to mitigate the harshness of criminal law by bolstering the human rights of victims of trafficking. 151 00:14:49,770 --> 00:14:58,450 And you know, it's no secret that governments actually prefer the organised crime stream because this empowers governments. 152 00:14:58,500 --> 00:15:05,290 But police. And partly because the trafficking protocol really arose from the alignment of geopolitical 153 00:15:05,290 --> 00:15:08,930 interests of developed countries to police borders in the wake of globalisation. 154 00:15:11,110 --> 00:15:14,679 The third approach to trafficking is the labour approach, 155 00:15:14,680 --> 00:15:20,229 which essentially understands the difference between the exploitation of workers and trafficking as a matter of degree, 156 00:15:20,230 --> 00:15:29,380 not as kind and points to the role of restrictive immigration to James and delivery directly to leverage in producing extradition and subordination. 157 00:15:30,400 --> 00:15:31,420 And, you know, 158 00:15:31,450 --> 00:15:39,070 Labour scholars argue that this is just these restrictive labour and immigration divisions that actually render workers vulnerable to trafficking. 159 00:15:39,940 --> 00:15:46,600 Now, why the criminal justice approach is driven by a mythology of isolated bad apples or traffickers. 160 00:15:47,320 --> 00:15:51,370 Advocates of the labour approach actually argue that it is only by addressing the criminal. 161 00:15:52,510 --> 00:15:57,040 I argue that addressing just the criminal acts of individual traffickers actually entrenches a 162 00:15:57,040 --> 00:16:02,650 politics of exception and in the meantime legitimises a range of other exploitative labour practices. 163 00:16:03,400 --> 00:16:10,209 Now, this yet another development to this to this anti-trafficking framework, 164 00:16:10,210 --> 00:16:17,950 which is the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals with a specific target, 8.7 is devoted to trafficking and forced labour. 165 00:16:18,550 --> 00:16:27,100 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. 166 00:16:28,000 --> 00:16:31,960 But I think for our purposes today, if you just look at the issue of trafficking, 167 00:16:32,350 --> 00:16:37,209 we can see that what started off with campaigns against the forced movement of women across 168 00:16:37,210 --> 00:16:43,090 borders for prostitution in the 1990s has today morphed into consumers worrying about slaves, 169 00:16:43,090 --> 00:16:49,900 quote unquote, who wash our cars, do our knees, service our hotels, and manufacture the clothes we read and the chocolate we consume. 170 00:16:49,930 --> 00:16:55,450 So we've seen really a huge shift in the way that trafficking or modern slavery is understood. 171 00:16:57,190 --> 00:17:05,140 And correspondingly, the trafficking protocol has spawned a stunning legal and extralegal architecture, which is expanding as we speak. 172 00:17:05,800 --> 00:17:12,940 The most recent addition being the Lichtenstein Initiative for the Financial Sector Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, 173 00:17:12,940 --> 00:17:16,270 which was set up in 2000 meetings. It's a very dynamic field. 174 00:17:17,210 --> 00:17:20,440 And what is interesting is, despite its prolific development, 175 00:17:21,100 --> 00:17:26,350 this particular trafficking legal order has actually been quite poorly institutionalised. 176 00:17:26,350 --> 00:17:31,419 So if you look at the rates of conviction under anti-trafficking laws, the numbers are quite abysmal. 177 00:17:31,420 --> 00:17:36,940 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, 178 00:17:37,690 --> 00:17:42,010 the number of convictions run into the thousands rather than the millions. 179 00:17:42,020 --> 00:17:49,270 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. 180 00:17:49,780 --> 00:17:56,710 And the UNODC itself admits that although there was an initial proliferation of anti-trafficking laws around the world, 181 00:17:57,160 --> 00:18:02,170 in fact the rate as enacted has been stagnated at a low level. 182 00:18:02,180 --> 00:18:04,240 And these are the words of the year A.S. 183 00:18:04,840 --> 00:18:11,169 Now, there are various factors for the poor enforcement of anti-trafficking laws, and I think I've only alluded to some of these, 184 00:18:11,170 --> 00:18:15,730 which is, you know, actually, no one is very clear about what trafficking exactly means, 185 00:18:17,170 --> 00:18:19,629 you know, in the sort of popular consciousness, 186 00:18:19,630 --> 00:18:27,520 but also particularly when it comes to prosecutors who are trying to decide what is the threshold before they, in fact, prosecute trafficking crimes. 187 00:18:28,720 --> 00:18:31,930 Part of the problem certainly is what experts call expectation creep. 188 00:18:32,080 --> 00:18:37,210 You know, this expansion of the idea of trafficking to cover various forms of labour exploitation. 189 00:18:37,720 --> 00:18:41,140 Now, what is interesting, of course, is despite its poor implementation, 190 00:18:41,140 --> 00:18:48,360 the nexus between trafficking and the crackdown on sex work remains quite strong, even 20 years after the protocol was adopted. 191 00:18:48,370 --> 00:18:53,440 So some countries continue to define trafficking in terms of sex work like prison. 192 00:18:54,340 --> 00:18:59,620 There are others that distinguish between innocent victims who are trafficked into sex work and willing sex work, 193 00:18:59,980 --> 00:19:01,960 sex workers who are not legally innocent. 194 00:19:02,050 --> 00:19:09,970 In the case of Romania, or countries that equate adult sex workers with children so that their consent is not required for proving tracking. 195 00:19:10,840 --> 00:19:15,820 Of course, we are also aware of the Swedish model which the trafficking protocol you give an impetus to 196 00:19:15,910 --> 00:19:20,680 and the Swedish model of criminalising demand for sex work has since become quite popular, 197 00:19:20,680 --> 00:19:26,230 with many countries legislating along those very similar lines. 198 00:19:27,070 --> 00:19:34,600 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, 199 00:19:34,600 --> 00:19:42,910 even cases where victims are not supposed to be arrested for trafficking and many of them were actually arrested for prostitution related offences. 200 00:19:44,380 --> 00:19:51,550 It's the same case in Singapore where on the face of it, trafficking is defined as extending to various labour sectors. 201 00:19:51,550 --> 00:19:58,360 But in reality, anti-trafficking strategies identify victims of sex trafficking and undocumented migrants. 202 00:19:58,900 --> 00:20:02,150 So. Even the best champion of the testing protocol. 203 00:20:02,150 --> 00:20:04,160 And Gallagher, who's an international lawyer, 204 00:20:04,700 --> 00:20:10,849 has recently remarked that the trafficking for sexual exploitation to seize the lion's share of criminal justice, 205 00:20:10,850 --> 00:20:13,550 attention and resources in most, if not all, countries. 206 00:20:14,510 --> 00:20:21,140 So it's clear that the trafficking legal order remains preoccupied with sex work, exceptionalism, if not on paper, at least in practice. 207 00:20:21,650 --> 00:20:25,700 And this has definitely precluded laws to strengthen protections for sex workers. 208 00:20:26,900 --> 00:20:32,930 Now, what makes this association of the anti-trafficking legal order with sex work so enduring? 209 00:20:33,620 --> 00:20:44,300 So in her new book, Elizabeth Bernstein argues that we need to go beyond some of the initial frameworks to explain this enduring association. 210 00:20:44,660 --> 00:20:48,590 So some of the earlier explanations referred to as sex panic, 211 00:20:49,700 --> 00:20:55,850 which experts argued was the reason why trafficking was associated overwhelmingly with sex work. 212 00:20:56,240 --> 00:21:01,670 But what she argues is that a new politics of sex and gender is today brokered by the neoliberal state 213 00:21:01,970 --> 00:21:07,730 and is entrenched in right wing and left wing spaces and is expressed in religious and secular terms. 214 00:21:08,630 --> 00:21:15,710 So what she calls what is a comprehensive theory that addresses the sexual, humanitarian and late capitalist dimensions of anti-trafficking discourse. 215 00:21:16,490 --> 00:21:17,270 So, for example, 216 00:21:17,270 --> 00:21:24,560 she theorises the sexual politics inherent in anti-trafficking discourse in terms of the interests of what she calls carceral feminism. 217 00:21:25,400 --> 00:21:29,510 She explains the humanitarian element in terms of militarised humanitarianism. 218 00:21:30,110 --> 00:21:35,570 And she explains the late capitalist dimension in terms of its redemptive role in 219 00:21:35,960 --> 00:21:40,010 seeming to solve the problem of trafficking rather than being the site of the problem. 220 00:21:40,490 --> 00:21:47,450 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, 221 00:21:47,990 --> 00:21:54,140 they are rife with it, extensive subcontracting arrangements and poor labour conditions. 222 00:21:54,560 --> 00:21:56,990 And some of these corporations are very cynical about, in fact, 223 00:21:56,990 --> 00:22:05,600 wanting to focus on trafficking so that there is less attention to the kinds of labour instruments that they've normalised. 224 00:22:06,620 --> 00:22:15,650 Now, Bernstein further complicates the thesis of the strange bedfellows, because I think initially when anti-trafficking laws were passed, 225 00:22:15,980 --> 00:22:21,049 there was a sense that radical feminist would push for these anti-trafficking laws somehow found 226 00:22:21,050 --> 00:22:26,480 themselves in alliance with evangelical Christians who they hadn't intended to actually align with. 227 00:22:27,530 --> 00:22:31,549 She offers a corrective to this perspective, and actually she says that there is, 228 00:22:31,550 --> 00:22:35,240 in fact, a more enduring alliance between the two groups, and that is, in fact, 229 00:22:35,660 --> 00:22:40,459 facilitated by a rightward shift on the part of mainstream feminists away from the 230 00:22:40,460 --> 00:22:46,310 redistributive model of justice and simultaneously often leftward move of young evangelicals, 231 00:22:46,490 --> 00:22:49,280 away from polarising issues such as gay rights and abortion, 232 00:22:49,670 --> 00:22:54,710 towards a globally oriented social justice theology for which trafficking is the ideal poster child. 233 00:22:56,000 --> 00:23:00,950 And when you think of militarised humanitarianism, I think, as the name suggests, 234 00:23:00,950 --> 00:23:04,100 it refers to neocolonial humanitarian interventions in the Global South, 235 00:23:04,610 --> 00:23:09,290 where undercover redistributive habilitation missions are used routinely by 236 00:23:09,290 --> 00:23:12,950 Western anti-slavery crusaders to save Third World women from Third World men. 237 00:23:13,850 --> 00:23:21,080 So this you know, this explanation for the enduring association between trafficking and sex work is quite compelling, I think. 238 00:23:22,400 --> 00:23:27,350 What I'm interested in is if this complex alliance of social actors and ideologies, 239 00:23:27,350 --> 00:23:30,500 do they actually some legitimacy from their international ventures? 240 00:23:31,040 --> 00:23:38,989 What then sustains these projects abroad? So Bernstein, in her book, actually has a chapter on what she calls the troubles of trafficking. 241 00:23:38,990 --> 00:23:44,350 And then she actually looks at reality tours, which are arranged by NGOs in Thailand. 242 00:23:44,380 --> 00:23:50,870 And this is one of the places that she visits. And, you know, where Western tourists are taken to trafficking hotspots. 243 00:23:51,890 --> 00:23:56,720 And certainly her description of the tools sound like the tools themselves are quite selective. 244 00:23:56,750 --> 00:24:01,219 They're quite haphazardly organised in fact, and they put together with limited, 245 00:24:01,220 --> 00:24:05,810 very limited interactions with local communities that actually deal with trafficking. 246 00:24:06,080 --> 00:24:09,440 And there is definitely no interaction with sex worker rights groups. 247 00:24:10,160 --> 00:24:17,030 Now while we can see how the hegemonic Western anti-trafficking discourse is reinforced by such charity tourism, 248 00:24:17,480 --> 00:24:24,860 I argue that we need a fuller explanation for this economic and political edifice in the Global South that actually permits its perpetuation. 249 00:24:25,400 --> 00:24:30,830 So in my view, I think we need a fuller account for the transnational limiting of Western anti-trafficking discourse. 250 00:24:31,340 --> 00:24:36,080 And for this, I offer some insights using the Indian experience. 251 00:24:36,650 --> 00:24:42,830 And although we don't have this the same kind of tourist linkages and trafficking reality tours in the Indian context, 252 00:24:42,830 --> 00:24:47,389 I think it's worth exploring the resilient links and pathways of global 253 00:24:47,390 --> 00:24:52,190 governmentality that anchor the sexual politics of anti-trafficking discourse today. 254 00:24:53,300 --> 00:24:59,000 So before I speak specifically to the Indian context, I want to elaborate on my starting. 255 00:24:59,080 --> 00:25:07,920 Points, which are slightly different from those of Bernstein. So I've been part of a recent collaborative project on governance, feminism read, 256 00:25:08,410 --> 00:25:16,810 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. 257 00:25:17,500 --> 00:25:19,420 And in this book on governance, feminism, 258 00:25:19,420 --> 00:25:26,200 we actually noted several of the trends that Bernstein observes on the emergence of coastal feminism and the feminist turn to criminal law, 259 00:25:26,200 --> 00:25:29,380 solutions to intractable problems of gender inequality. 260 00:25:30,730 --> 00:25:38,950 However, we also found the concept of governance feminism to capture more fully the influence of feminists in 261 00:25:38,950 --> 00:25:45,219 policy circles beyond criminal law initiatives and extending to reform in various other areas of the law, 262 00:25:45,220 --> 00:25:49,780 including constitutional law, family law, law and development, corporate law and employment law. 263 00:25:50,530 --> 00:25:55,089 Further, while coastal feminism captures the role of feminist visibly state policy, 264 00:25:55,090 --> 00:26:01,030 I think governance feminism speaks more broadly to the influence of feminist beyond the state or, 265 00:26:01,150 --> 00:26:06,880 you know, corridors of power to include that influence on institutions and even popular culture. 266 00:26:07,720 --> 00:26:14,170 So I think capturing this dimension of feminist influence helps us assess the workings of Governmentality and how 267 00:26:14,170 --> 00:26:20,650 even traditionally powerless groups like sex workers can also sometimes find pathways within these workings. 268 00:26:21,020 --> 00:26:24,639 To every now and then exert influence in policy circles. 269 00:26:24,640 --> 00:26:28,930 And I'll speak about this later in my paper. 270 00:26:30,970 --> 00:26:37,959 I think what is also a point of departure from what Bernstein has written about is that in many contexts, 271 00:26:37,960 --> 00:26:45,010 and this is certainly true of the Indian context, is that governance, feminism does not always emerge only from civil society. 272 00:26:45,490 --> 00:26:51,310 In fact, the Indian state is a site for what it's referred to as state feminism. 273 00:26:51,730 --> 00:26:53,650 So the Indian state in the 1970s, 274 00:26:53,650 --> 00:26:59,680 in fact embraced the project of gender or gender equality by setting up a Department for Women and Child Development, 275 00:26:59,800 --> 00:27:07,310 which is now a full fledged ministry alongside a National Commission for Women, as well as state commissions for women at the provincial levels. 276 00:27:07,810 --> 00:27:12,460 And the role of these commissions, which are expert bodies on gender issues, 277 00:27:12,640 --> 00:27:17,170 was that they often set the default policy on a given issue of gender inequality. 278 00:27:17,620 --> 00:27:24,639 So we can think of this in terms of state feminism. So we need we need an extended vocabulary to look at good governance, 279 00:27:24,640 --> 00:27:30,940 feminism and how it interacts with state feminism in producing the sexual politics of anti-trafficking discourse. 280 00:27:32,050 --> 00:27:39,040 And I think I also want to add to the conversation in part of chatterjee's pieces on civil society, in political society, 281 00:27:39,040 --> 00:27:42,879 which I think is quite useful in trying to understand the relationship between how Indian 282 00:27:42,880 --> 00:27:49,000 feminists have lobbied for law reform and how sex workers have lobbied for law reform, 283 00:27:49,450 --> 00:27:54,639 or rather fought back against these efforts. So they simply chatted. 284 00:27:54,640 --> 00:28:02,890 He talks about how civil societies are restricted sphere within which, you know, elite citizens engage as rights bearers with the state. 285 00:28:02,890 --> 00:28:10,870 But as political society is that heterogeneous population groups engage with the state in the realm of self-governance mentality. 286 00:28:11,230 --> 00:28:17,200 So they may be engaged in various legal activities, which doesn't allow them to, in fact engage with the state as citizens, 287 00:28:17,200 --> 00:28:22,090 but they are nevertheless crucial for maintaining the legitimacy of the post-colonial state. 288 00:28:23,260 --> 00:28:29,680 And I think there's another point of departure from Bernstein thesis is the role of neoliberalism 289 00:28:29,680 --> 00:28:34,300 and of late capitalism and what role they may play in sustaining anti-trafficking discourse. 290 00:28:34,720 --> 00:28:42,460 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. 291 00:28:43,810 --> 00:28:48,310 Namely, come out of Russia and she can speak very eloquently to this and I've drawn a lot from her work. 292 00:28:49,150 --> 00:28:56,770 You find that it hasn't quite developed at the same pace and is faced with a social and political context that 293 00:28:56,770 --> 00:29:02,320 does not let it advance uninterrupted and in fact often produces quite counter-intuitive configurations. 294 00:29:02,830 --> 00:29:10,870 So for example, while Bernstein talks about the new Libyan capital policies which accompany a retreat of the welfare state in the Western context, 295 00:29:10,870 --> 00:29:14,230 in fact, in the Indian context, the welfare state is growing rather than receding. 296 00:29:14,740 --> 00:29:22,569 So this is an element of Bernstein's argument that doesn't quite relate directly to the maintenance of this hegemonic anti-trafficking discourse. 297 00:29:22,570 --> 00:29:30,130 But there is another dimension of it where when we talk about a development approach to trafficking, maybe we could discuss further. 298 00:29:31,210 --> 00:29:36,640 So what I want to do now is to set out actually some of the introduce to you 299 00:29:36,640 --> 00:29:41,650 actually the key players in the Indian context who are active on on trafficking. 300 00:29:42,130 --> 00:29:44,320 And one can think of two broad categories. 301 00:29:44,320 --> 00:29:50,920 We have sex workers groups, and then we have groups that are not made up of sex workers, just to be very, very simplistic. 302 00:29:51,550 --> 00:29:59,010 Now, sex workers groups in India draw on materialist feminist thinking and in conceptualising. 303 00:29:59,460 --> 00:30:04,590 Sex work is a form of reproductive labour and they are organised in various ways as collectives, 304 00:30:04,590 --> 00:30:10,170 as trade unions, as community based organisations, or simply NGOs that provide services to sex workers. 305 00:30:10,950 --> 00:30:14,910 Now the non sex worker constituency, on the other hand, is quite varied. 306 00:30:15,570 --> 00:30:21,330 It consists of feminists within the Indian women's movement. It consists of Marxism, Matilda's feminists. 307 00:30:22,020 --> 00:30:29,730 It consists of anti-trafficking messengers who are radical, who espouse the radical feminist ideology. 308 00:30:30,210 --> 00:30:33,800 And then you have anti-trafficking NGOs, which are not necessarily feminist. 309 00:30:33,810 --> 00:30:43,770 And it's this interplay between these various actors that produces a certain version of anti-trafficking and discourse in the Indian context. 310 00:30:44,520 --> 00:30:53,810 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. 311 00:30:53,820 --> 00:30:57,880 It sought to be autonomous, both in a political sense from, you know, 312 00:30:57,990 --> 00:31:03,960 leftist parties and also wanted to be financially independent from external and project based funding. 313 00:31:04,500 --> 00:31:10,620 Now, what is interesting about the Indian women's movement is that it has crafted and indigenously 314 00:31:10,810 --> 00:31:14,400 the radical materialist feminist politics on the issue of violence against women. 315 00:31:14,910 --> 00:31:17,850 And this becomes important later, as I illustrate. 316 00:31:18,390 --> 00:31:25,350 And the movement has actually heavily lobbied for statutory law reform in the areas of rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence. 317 00:31:25,680 --> 00:31:33,540 But very interestingly, it has historically ignored the, quote unquote, prostitution question and consequently the issue of trafficking. 318 00:31:34,200 --> 00:31:41,190 And I'll return to this later. Now, if you look at abolitionist NGOs, again, as I said, they could be feminist. 319 00:31:41,640 --> 00:31:46,770 And an example of such a radical feminist abolitionist NGO is up north, 320 00:31:47,580 --> 00:31:52,530 which claims to be influenced by Gandhian thought but is keen to abolish sex work through raids, 321 00:31:52,530 --> 00:31:56,400 rescue and habilitation and importantly, the targeting of the mind. 322 00:31:56,430 --> 00:32:05,399 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. 323 00:32:05,400 --> 00:32:11,310 And she hosted influential some feminists in India, such as Catherine macKinnon, Denis Raymond and Gloria Steinem, 324 00:32:11,670 --> 00:32:16,290 who have repeatedly call on the government to adopt the Swedish model to eradicate sex work in India. 325 00:32:17,670 --> 00:32:28,110 Now we have new abolitionists, NGOs who are not necessarily feminist, and these include NGOs like Pledge will prove Shakti by hand, 326 00:32:28,560 --> 00:32:38,070 and importantly, a child labour group called Bachchan Bhutto Andolan, which is headed by Kailash Satyarthi, who won the Nobel Prize in 2014. 327 00:32:38,790 --> 00:32:43,090 Now they're feminist credentials are not included, but they are opposed to sex, 328 00:32:43,110 --> 00:32:51,330 but possibly persuaded by a cultural nationalist and a socially conservative politics which seeks to protect the dignity of Indian men, 329 00:32:51,780 --> 00:32:56,310 women and children. And many of these NGOs have actually worked very closely with the UNODC, 330 00:32:56,580 --> 00:33:02,850 and they are quite committed to a criminal crime controlled paradigm of trafficking. 331 00:33:02,860 --> 00:33:04,799 So very much interested in Jade's risk. 332 00:33:04,800 --> 00:33:13,860 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, 333 00:33:13,860 --> 00:33:19,620 that in fact, we should use the criminal law to target the worst forms of labour exploitation. 334 00:33:20,670 --> 00:33:30,090 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. 335 00:33:30,960 --> 00:33:34,110 I won't go into the details of the laws on this absolutely necessary. 336 00:33:34,110 --> 00:33:37,290 But, you know, most countries in the world have, you know, 337 00:33:37,290 --> 00:33:44,580 a penal code or some sort of general body of criminal law which has anti-slavery and forced labour provisions like we do. 338 00:33:46,110 --> 00:33:49,860 And then most countries also have an anti-sex work criminal law. 339 00:33:50,280 --> 00:33:59,910 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. 340 00:34:00,780 --> 00:34:06,170 In addition, we have a range of labour laws actually, which very much dealt with what we would think of as trafficking today, 341 00:34:06,180 --> 00:34:13,559 you know, and typically dealing with bonded labour or contractually by interstate migrant workers. 342 00:34:13,560 --> 00:34:20,730 So often, you know, given the size of the country, you know, and the hundreds of millions of interstate migrants, 343 00:34:20,730 --> 00:34:24,360 you'd often have migrants from a less developed part of the country. 344 00:34:24,360 --> 00:34:26,790 Travelling to a more developed part of the country didn't speak. 345 00:34:26,790 --> 00:34:34,110 The local language was paid far less than the local workers were and, you know, was basically duped into undertaking that work. 346 00:34:34,120 --> 00:34:39,120 So we would call the trafficking today, but these labour laws did not think of them as trafficking, 347 00:34:39,330 --> 00:34:45,120 but we can think of it as being as dealing with the social phenomenon of trafficking. 348 00:34:45,840 --> 00:34:50,549 Now, so I'm going to start off from the 1950s. 349 00:34:50,550 --> 00:34:58,620 As I already said, in the fifties, we had an anti-sex work criminal law, but sex workers resisted by constitutionally challenging. 350 00:34:59,430 --> 00:35:09,930 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, 351 00:35:10,260 --> 00:35:13,830 but actually criminalises all activities necessary in order to perform sex work. 352 00:35:14,340 --> 00:35:22,680 And again, not surprisingly, it is used disproportionately to prosecute sex workers rather than exploitative stakeholders in sex markets. 353 00:35:23,610 --> 00:35:27,150 So sex workers end up doing more sex work to pay off their fines. 354 00:35:27,550 --> 00:35:31,470 The police also engage in extensive rent seeking behaviour through bribes. 355 00:35:31,920 --> 00:35:36,990 And as a result, the the ITP, as it's called, or their Model Traffic Prevention Act, 356 00:35:37,200 --> 00:35:41,370 undermines sex workers economic bargaining power within the sex sector. 357 00:35:42,150 --> 00:35:49,920 Now, in the 1980s, so you had this law, but then in the 1980s, something changed for sex workers for the discovery of HIV. 358 00:35:49,920 --> 00:35:54,450 There was a lot of HIV prevention funding which made its way into the developing world, 359 00:35:54,450 --> 00:35:58,050 and this actually provided an impetus for sex workers to organise. 360 00:35:58,710 --> 00:36:03,690 And so starting in the early 1990s, sex workers organise locally, 361 00:36:03,690 --> 00:36:08,820 but very soon they came together in the form of the National Network of Sex Workers in 1997. 362 00:36:09,300 --> 00:36:15,900 And what is very interesting is that sex workers groups did not litigate and they certainly did not mobilise to repeal the ITP. 363 00:36:16,830 --> 00:36:22,080 Rather, their relationship with the state is best captured by one of the Calcutta based sex workers groups, 364 00:36:22,860 --> 00:36:27,240 which used the metaphor of shield, not sports. When they thought of the law, they thought of it as a shield. 365 00:36:28,110 --> 00:36:34,290 They saw the law as fundamentally ineffective in addressing their most pressing concerns, which was stigma and harassment by the police. 366 00:36:35,070 --> 00:36:38,580 They instead negotiated with the state in political society. 367 00:36:39,690 --> 00:36:42,989 And so they would often fashion themselves as day labourers, 368 00:36:42,990 --> 00:36:48,209 as needful as people living below the poverty line and as workers in the unorganised sector. 369 00:36:48,210 --> 00:36:54,510 Because these were the various areas in which the Indian state had actually provided welfare policies for various population groups. 370 00:36:55,860 --> 00:37:02,610 And alongside this, since the mid 1990s, as I've already mentioned, we have institutions of state feminism. 371 00:37:02,620 --> 00:37:10,290 So we had the National Commission for Women and one of its very first tasks was to produce a position paper on sex work. 372 00:37:10,530 --> 00:37:14,700 And so very early on, the National Commission actually was committed to abolishing sex books. 373 00:37:15,000 --> 00:37:18,690 And this then became the Indian state's default policy on sex work. 374 00:37:18,960 --> 00:37:25,560 But actually, there wasn't any move to amend the ATP. Instead, there was some public interest litigation by Supreme Court lawyers, 375 00:37:25,560 --> 00:37:33,000 and there's some halfhearted attempt on the part of the state to produce a plan of action which again treated sex workers as, 376 00:37:33,450 --> 00:37:36,269 quote unquote, economically weaker sections of society. 377 00:37:36,270 --> 00:37:42,660 So to give benefits such as housing, health and education, but really did not broach the question of decriminalisation, 378 00:37:43,440 --> 00:37:48,510 decriminalisation or protecting sex workers from prosecution under the ATP. 379 00:37:49,410 --> 00:37:55,260 Now, frustrated by this lack of legislative action, a lot of the new abolitionist NGOs, like fraudulent activity, 380 00:37:55,560 --> 00:38:00,960 then undertook public interest litigation and they were assisted in this by liberal look a stand out requirements. 381 00:38:01,410 --> 00:38:06,629 And so they began to demand prosecution of traffickers. They wanted a victims protection protocol. 382 00:38:06,630 --> 00:38:10,050 They wanted better conditions and habilitation homes and in rescue homes. 383 00:38:10,590 --> 00:38:15,090 And so what happens is you begin to see these public interest losses emerge all over the country. 384 00:38:15,420 --> 00:38:21,240 They soon became repeat players before the Supreme Court and the Delhi Bombay High Courts and 385 00:38:22,080 --> 00:38:26,400 courts began to respond by directing the executive to formulate plans for rehabilitation. 386 00:38:26,410 --> 00:38:31,049 Very well-meaning. But what what happened here was that in the process, 387 00:38:31,050 --> 00:38:38,040 this facilitated partnership between new abolitionist NGOs and the police on the ground in data desk operations. 388 00:38:38,490 --> 00:38:46,080 So we find that these early petitions actually laid the foundation for continuous monitoring of the executive by courts for over a decade. 389 00:38:46,080 --> 00:38:51,330 And this led, in turn, to the creation of several expert advisory bodies. 390 00:38:52,380 --> 00:39:00,480 Now, of course, internationally, we find that with the adoption of the Palermo Protocol in 2000 and the release of the US Step reports, 391 00:39:00,840 --> 00:39:06,990 India begins initially, does well under the TTIP reports, but in 2004 it is downgraded to a tier two watch list. 392 00:39:07,350 --> 00:39:11,970 And then you become you are at risk for losing aid from the US government. 393 00:39:12,420 --> 00:39:17,459 And it was in response to this degrading 2000 crore that the Department for Women and 394 00:39:17,460 --> 00:39:22,810 Child Development proposed to amend the ITP to criminalise customers of sex workers. 395 00:39:22,830 --> 00:39:27,630 In effect, you know, operationalising the Swedish model. 396 00:39:28,260 --> 00:39:33,209 But interestingly, the bill was defeated because of disagreements within the union cabinet. 397 00:39:33,210 --> 00:39:40,530 And this is where I think we find simultaneous flows of international funding for HIV prevention on the one hand, 398 00:39:40,530 --> 00:39:42,810 but also for abolitionist activities. 399 00:39:43,110 --> 00:39:48,690 So what really happens is that the Health Minister disagrees with the Home Minister on adopting the Swedish model 400 00:39:48,990 --> 00:39:53,970 and is worried about the negative effects that the Swedish model might actually have on HIV prevention projects. 401 00:39:54,360 --> 00:39:58,890 So in 2005, this Swedish model is warded off, but we find. 402 00:39:58,960 --> 00:40:04,690 A whole new set of new abolitionists and NGOs who find actually the litigation to be a very useful strategy. 403 00:40:05,110 --> 00:40:09,910 So we find out, play up and much fun. But I wonder underline also then setting up, 404 00:40:10,780 --> 00:40:18,130 assisting the executive in setting up various specialist agencies and they become very heavily involved in drafting or creating protocols, 405 00:40:19,000 --> 00:40:22,480 you know, when rescuing and rehabilitating trafficked persons. 406 00:40:22,810 --> 00:40:29,560 So what this means is that over time, this the executive came to rely heavily on these very endures as experts on 407 00:40:29,560 --> 00:40:35,440 trafficking so that whenever the state acquired assistance in drafting a new law, 408 00:40:35,440 --> 00:40:43,149 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. 409 00:40:43,150 --> 00:40:46,240 It's very porous to the influence of new abolitionist NGOs. 410 00:40:47,200 --> 00:40:55,450 And of course, then what happened was that in 2012, when the rape and murder of Jyoti Pandey happened in Delhi, 411 00:40:55,870 --> 00:41:00,640 these abolitionist groups actually found an opportunity for lobbying on trafficking. 412 00:41:01,030 --> 00:41:07,210 So what is fascinating is that the second longest chapter in the Burma Committee report, which is appointed after her murder, 413 00:41:08,980 --> 00:41:13,270 the longest chapter in the committee report after reports on trafficking, which is extraordinary, 414 00:41:13,270 --> 00:41:18,969 really, because, you know, trafficking was never on the horizon for the Indian women's movement. 415 00:41:18,970 --> 00:41:21,550 So it was quite surprising to find that in the report. 416 00:41:22,000 --> 00:41:27,670 And the committee very interestingly recommended an anti-trafficking offence that was actually modelled on the Palermo protocol, 417 00:41:27,940 --> 00:41:31,570 but which conflated sex work, quality sex work with trafficking. 418 00:41:32,470 --> 00:41:35,770 And this was welcomed by Bitcoin. 419 00:41:35,770 --> 00:41:39,790 But I underline and perhaps and ironically Indian feminist groups, because in fact, 420 00:41:39,790 --> 00:41:43,630 they were quite they were caught on the wrong foot when it came to the issue of trafficking. 421 00:41:44,710 --> 00:41:49,810 And it was only when sex workers groups, especially the National Network for Sex Workers, 422 00:41:50,170 --> 00:41:53,620 protested that there were more committed will do this particular recommendation. 423 00:41:54,190 --> 00:42:02,950 And we then had a standalone trafficking offence in the Indian Penal Code, which simply mirrored the Palermo Protocol definition of trafficking. 424 00:42:03,760 --> 00:42:10,989 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, 425 00:42:10,990 --> 00:42:18,610 comes alive in the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court dismisses that on the assurance of the Ministry of Women and Child 426 00:42:18,610 --> 00:42:22,450 Development that they will actually draft a comprehensive legislation on trafficking. 427 00:42:22,930 --> 00:42:29,740 And so this then led to the introduction of the trafficking bill, which was passed in the Lower House of Parliament in July 2018, 428 00:42:29,980 --> 00:42:35,080 but has since lapsed because it wasn't presented before the Upper House of Parliament. 429 00:42:36,250 --> 00:42:45,190 Now there couldn't be a better statement or better channelling of new abolitionist thinking on trafficking than the 2018 trafficking bill. 430 00:42:45,790 --> 00:42:54,729 So ignoring a very long history of dealing with trafficking through labour law and in fact, 431 00:42:54,730 --> 00:42:58,540 the 2018 trafficking bill is a draconian piece of legislation. 432 00:42:58,990 --> 00:43:06,690 It intent was a classic religious duty rehabilitation model, and it has a criminal law system that has stringent penalties, 433 00:43:06,740 --> 00:43:13,930 reverses a burden of proof for fighting traffickers assets, and an extensive surveillance machinery that's meant to prevent trafficking. 434 00:43:14,980 --> 00:43:22,720 And it has various aggravated trafficking offences that then extends to bonded labour, forced labour marriage, begging and so on. 435 00:43:23,500 --> 00:43:26,920 So these are all forms of exploitation which are not listed in the trafficking protocol, 436 00:43:26,920 --> 00:43:34,830 but many countries have actually expanded the remit of trafficking and these offences are cognisable a non-bailable. 437 00:43:35,410 --> 00:43:39,140 And it's quite perplexing that the bill focus on focuses on just going to 438 00:43:39,160 --> 00:43:43,719 habilitation because existing homes have historically proven to be ineffective. 439 00:43:43,720 --> 00:43:50,380 And in fact last year there was there's a scandal around these shelter homes all over the country where 440 00:43:50,410 --> 00:43:56,350 children were found to be sexually abused by the very people who ran these homes in Muzaffarpur. 441 00:43:56,350 --> 00:44:02,530 And this has now led to a whole investigation around shelter homes all over the country. 442 00:44:02,530 --> 00:44:11,200 And in fact, all the expert state commissions on women have have actually expressed their disgust for these shelter homes in nothing but, 443 00:44:11,470 --> 00:44:19,960 you know, brothels by another name. Nevertheless, the bill focuses on setting up or using existing shelter homes. 444 00:44:21,100 --> 00:44:28,840 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. 445 00:44:29,020 --> 00:44:32,380 So the relationship between these various laws is quite unclear. 446 00:44:32,950 --> 00:44:40,719 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, 447 00:44:40,720 --> 00:44:47,650 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. 448 00:44:47,830 --> 00:44:51,460 It simply transports them to all the other sectors of work. 449 00:44:51,820 --> 00:44:58,540 So in the context of bonded labour, it actually one could imagine a workplace sort of factory being shut down because the. 450 00:44:58,890 --> 00:45:02,040 A model is being used in the proposed trafficking bill. 451 00:45:02,670 --> 00:45:08,820 So the letter and spirit of labour laws are entirely missing in the boot, which really only channels the ITP. 452 00:45:10,050 --> 00:45:18,210 So how does one begin to analyse, you know, these decades of lobbying for and Indian anti-trafficking legislation? 453 00:45:18,840 --> 00:45:24,149 So I want to reflect a bit on what the various stakeholders did in this context and to qualify some of the 454 00:45:24,150 --> 00:45:33,090 other assertions that Bernstein makes about the the continuing focus on sex work in anti-trafficking discourse. 455 00:45:33,780 --> 00:45:38,880 So the first issue around coastal feminism or governance feminism. 456 00:45:39,300 --> 00:45:45,210 Now, it is actually true that feminists within the Indian women's movement have increasingly relied on criminal law. 457 00:45:45,480 --> 00:45:49,620 And in you know, in the book that I mentioned on governance, feminism, 458 00:45:49,980 --> 00:45:56,430 I have a chapter there which actually maps how Indian feminists of the past 35 years, in fact, in the context of flow reform, 459 00:45:56,670 --> 00:46:03,990 have relied increasingly on criminal law, how they become deeply committed to a highly gendered reading of sexual violence, 460 00:46:04,290 --> 00:46:07,740 and how they have a diluted oppositional stance. Missouri State Power. 461 00:46:07,750 --> 00:46:12,480 So, you know, if you think of women's movements being outside of movements with protest rallies and so on, 462 00:46:12,810 --> 00:46:16,040 this wasn't the case in the lead up to the reply often. 463 00:46:16,910 --> 00:46:25,320 In fact, feminist would a crucial part of the lawmaking process and several provisions on rape law, in fact, came from feminist demands. 464 00:46:25,980 --> 00:46:29,670 And the state, in fact, was also receptive to many feminist ideas. 465 00:46:30,330 --> 00:46:39,210 Interestingly, whole. On the question of trafficking in sex work, there was already intense feminist polarisation on this question. 466 00:46:39,660 --> 00:46:50,549 And because I argue that Indian feminists within the women's movement were materialist feminists, they were quite ambivalent about sex work. 467 00:46:50,550 --> 00:46:54,600 And so it's a it's a deep ambivalence. 468 00:46:54,600 --> 00:46:58,860 I think it's informed by a radical feminist resistance to the promotion of 469 00:46:58,860 --> 00:47:01,860 the rights of sex workers because they actually view a sex book as a burden. 470 00:47:02,430 --> 00:47:04,620 At the same time, they're materialist feminist. 471 00:47:04,620 --> 00:47:11,790 So they remember that actually these women are in the grip of capitalist patriarchy and therefore they have very constrained livelihood options. 472 00:47:12,390 --> 00:47:16,020 Therefore, they refrain from reaching out for the criminal law to abolish sex work. 473 00:47:16,260 --> 00:47:24,360 Unlike, say, American radical feminists who have spearheaded end demand campaigns despite the adverse consequences this has to sex workers. 474 00:47:24,990 --> 00:47:31,530 And so the reluctance to engage on the question of sex worker trafficking produced a vacuum in the policy space, 475 00:47:31,530 --> 00:47:34,170 which was then occupied by new abolitionists and Jews. 476 00:47:35,160 --> 00:47:42,810 But interestingly, the feminists in the women's movement did lend sex worker groups their support when they wanted to. 477 00:47:43,320 --> 00:47:50,010 They wanted the Burma committee to strike back on their conflation between sex work and trafficking. 478 00:47:50,010 --> 00:47:54,910 And this is quite interesting because I think this ambivalence allowed them to develop, you know, 479 00:47:54,930 --> 00:48:01,980 empathy for sex workers demands rather than have a very rigid, moralistic response to the question of sex work. 480 00:48:03,000 --> 00:48:10,230 Now, the vacuum created by the Indian women's movement was filled rapidly, as shown by new abolitionists, NGOs. 481 00:48:11,010 --> 00:48:14,420 And these issues interacted with the state in various spheres. 482 00:48:14,430 --> 00:48:21,479 So they engaged with the state through litigation. They collaborated outside the courtroom at the micro-level with local state functionaries, 483 00:48:21,480 --> 00:48:26,670 including the police, district magistrates, anti-human trafficking units and children's welfare committees. 484 00:48:27,060 --> 00:48:33,600 They participated in expert bodies. So literally every expert body that the government has set up on trafficking in sex work, 485 00:48:33,600 --> 00:48:39,270 you will find abolitionists and just the very same abolitionists and just repeatedly featuring on these expert bodies. 486 00:48:39,840 --> 00:48:44,670 So they not only petitioned the state, but they also work alongside the state and within the state. 487 00:48:45,150 --> 00:48:51,060 So one could really think of them as occupying the lead singer of civil society in Saturday's terms. 488 00:48:51,750 --> 00:49:01,380 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, 489 00:49:01,680 --> 00:49:07,080 especially once the leader of the Bataclan. But I recently spoke at an Oasis rally. 490 00:49:07,170 --> 00:49:13,380 But it's not that she has not really fully become explicit, but it is a very uneasy alliance. 491 00:49:14,310 --> 00:49:22,590 Now, thinking about sex focus groups. So initially, you know, as as as I already mentioned, sex workers have always experienced data as abusive. 492 00:49:22,590 --> 00:49:28,860 So then feminists were arguing for more criminal law to deal with the problem of violence for sex workers. 493 00:49:28,860 --> 00:49:35,040 The law itself was the problem. So they were never really the law wasn't a default option for the lobby. 494 00:49:35,040 --> 00:49:40,850 And in fact, in protest marches, for instance, in 2005 against the amendment to the ITP, 495 00:49:41,300 --> 00:49:49,050 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. 496 00:49:49,260 --> 00:49:56,520 So this is really their orientation towards the law. So they they did not litigate, you know, they didn't really resort to it. 497 00:49:56,520 --> 00:49:58,650 And as I've already shown, they really operated in. 498 00:49:59,010 --> 00:50:07,500 Political society, and it was very unclear what effects their lobbying would actually have because they've been at the receiving end of, 499 00:50:08,190 --> 00:50:15,570 you know, the brutal violence of the police. But they were also exposed to the state's softer, discursive power through HIV prevention projects. 500 00:50:16,380 --> 00:50:19,860 So either way, they were quite reluctant to rely on the law. 501 00:50:20,400 --> 00:50:26,700 And so in 2005, they managed to avert the Swedish model simply because they were you know, 502 00:50:27,210 --> 00:50:29,930 they were promoting safe sex through HIV prevention programs. 503 00:50:29,940 --> 00:50:33,930 And if they were criminalised or their customers were criminalised, this projects would go nowhere. 504 00:50:34,410 --> 00:50:39,600 And in 2013, they had to align with feminists from the Indian women's movement to really pressure the Obama committee. 505 00:50:40,350 --> 00:50:47,150 So but what has happened is, interestingly, they have also grown in stature and in influence. 506 00:50:47,160 --> 00:50:56,700 So in 2018, when the trafficking bill was proposed, one element of the sex workers movement actually reached out to a prominent opposition MP. 507 00:50:56,720 --> 00:51:00,840 She wrote to directly lobbied the Minister Maneka Gandhi. 508 00:51:01,050 --> 00:51:05,940 And so this had quite mixed results actually, but it's testament to their growing influence. 509 00:51:06,870 --> 00:51:10,859 So we find that these alliances between civil society and political society are 510 00:51:10,860 --> 00:51:15,630 possible and sex workers groups would fluidly move between the two of them. 511 00:51:17,040 --> 00:51:25,290 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. 512 00:51:25,300 --> 00:51:30,330 So in 2008 they had protest rallies all over the country even they had a protest rally in Parliament, 513 00:51:30,690 --> 00:51:38,639 whereas this time around we didn't find protest rallies. And in fact the impetus for public mobilisation came from the transgender rights movement 514 00:51:38,640 --> 00:51:43,410 because at the same time that the trafficking bill was being presented in Parliament, 515 00:51:43,620 --> 00:51:52,560 a transgender rights bill was also produced, and transgender groups rallied both against the trafficking bill, as well as the transgender bill. 516 00:51:53,280 --> 00:52:02,790 So so, you know, so it's quite interesting to see how these various constituencies have influenced the policy making process. 517 00:52:03,390 --> 00:52:08,070 And on the face of it, if we go back to the state feminists or to the rulers, which is the government, 518 00:52:08,490 --> 00:52:14,190 it's easy to dismiss the passage of the trafficking bill in the Lower House as simply a show of strength for the abolitionists, 519 00:52:14,850 --> 00:52:20,819 because after every influential Indian abolitionist had the ear of the minister and the opening statement of the minister 520 00:52:20,820 --> 00:52:25,920 in Parliament when she introduced the bill referred explicitly to cases of sexually brutalised women and children. 521 00:52:26,580 --> 00:52:32,790 But what is interesting is that if you look at the media statements leading up to the passage of the bill and soon after, 522 00:52:33,180 --> 00:52:40,740 one finds certain pragmatic concessions that the minister made to sex workers in the interests of diffusing their objections to its passage. 523 00:52:40,920 --> 00:52:45,300 So this, again, is a testament to sex workers power. So I'll just give you a few examples. 524 00:52:45,930 --> 00:52:54,690 So in here I'm analysing the debates in Parliament over the trafficking, but so when she goes to criticise, 525 00:52:54,690 --> 00:52:57,900 he channel the criticism of the sex workers groups against the trafficking bill. 526 00:52:58,170 --> 00:53:03,990 The Minister, in response to him, assured the House that voluntary sex work would not be affected by the bill. 527 00:53:04,860 --> 00:53:08,760 So she claimed that sex workers were invariably penalised, but as traffickers were not, 528 00:53:09,030 --> 00:53:13,680 that in fact, the bill adopted a compassionate view of people who had become victims in the sex. 529 00:53:15,000 --> 00:53:18,239 So I quote Yes. So she says in parliament, absolutely. 530 00:53:18,240 --> 00:53:21,450 There is no question of harassing them. The bill focuses on a victim. 531 00:53:21,990 --> 00:53:30,420 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, 532 00:53:30,720 --> 00:53:35,220 then there is no question of my harassing them or the police having anything to do with them. 533 00:53:35,670 --> 00:53:39,000 The bill is not intended to facilitate or to harass sex workers, 534 00:53:40,080 --> 00:53:48,569 and we find that another ruling party MP who also responded to Toad was more explicit in her condemnation of voluntary sex work. 535 00:53:48,570 --> 00:53:53,520 And so she actually talked about how no one would enter sex work if they had a choice, 536 00:53:53,520 --> 00:53:56,520 and none of us would want our children to actually become sex workers. 537 00:53:56,910 --> 00:54:01,260 So she was categorical that sex work would not be a profession. And so it's interesting. 538 00:54:01,260 --> 00:54:04,860 That is a dialogue between these two women in parliament. 539 00:54:05,580 --> 00:54:11,370 And the minister then derives on the other end piece comments and then says actually 540 00:54:11,370 --> 00:54:15,900 the only way to help women is to crack down on organised crime in red light areas. 541 00:54:16,140 --> 00:54:22,920 So it's this very ambivalent position of going back and forth on the question of one quality sex workers. 542 00:54:23,340 --> 00:54:28,770 And so it's clear that the position of the government was to support the sex worker, but not the sex industry itself. 543 00:54:29,340 --> 00:54:36,479 And a few days later, which is again, very unusual, the minister wrote an op ed in a leading newspaper and again clarified that, 544 00:54:36,480 --> 00:54:40,470 in fact, voluntary sex work would not be affected by the trafficking bill. 545 00:54:41,040 --> 00:54:50,850 But but that, in fact, the trafficking bill was giving sex workers the option for rehabilitation if she wished to discontinue sex work. 546 00:54:51,330 --> 00:54:58,590 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. 547 00:54:58,710 --> 00:55:06,510 And so and this this thread of trying to say that, in fact, the trafficking bill doesn't deal with quality sex work, 548 00:55:06,510 --> 00:55:13,350 but at the same time, rehabilitation is a right that's present provided by the trafficking bill reiterates itself. 549 00:55:14,520 --> 00:55:22,620 So in another similar op ed by an abolitionist, there is some concession to the fact that, in fact, women may have some agency. 550 00:55:23,130 --> 00:55:31,709 But really, this this commentator argued an abolitionist commentator argued that a sex worker may have some agency, 551 00:55:31,710 --> 00:55:33,750 but actually she's suffering under false consciousness. 552 00:55:33,750 --> 00:55:42,630 So you see some of the radical feminists object, you know, critiques of or objections to sex worker agency being rehearsed in these debates. 553 00:55:43,050 --> 00:55:47,550 So what is interesting about these arguments is that they are not novel in any way. 554 00:55:47,790 --> 00:55:52,080 I think pragmatically it's quite clear that it's the growing influence of sex workers, 555 00:55:52,380 --> 00:55:57,690 influence that the abolitionists and the government is trying to push back on. 556 00:55:58,860 --> 00:56:07,679 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. 557 00:56:07,680 --> 00:56:11,370 So even when the anti-sex work law was passed in the 1950s, 558 00:56:12,180 --> 00:56:19,829 it was in fact drafted by women from the nationalist movement who all along understood that they couldn't in fact criminalise the 559 00:56:19,830 --> 00:56:26,160 sex worker who was a victim of economic circumstance and whose freedom of occupation was actually protected by the Constitution. 560 00:56:26,610 --> 00:56:30,720 Instead, they never focussed on finalisation, they always focussed on the habilitation. 561 00:56:30,990 --> 00:56:36,330 And so this paternalistic politics of elite feminists actually continues today. 562 00:56:37,020 --> 00:56:44,700 So what is interesting about this feminist argument is that it tries to produce what I call the middle ground feminist position. 563 00:56:45,120 --> 00:56:50,670 And it's not confined to Indian feminist. Feminists all over the world actually have tried to, you know, 564 00:56:50,700 --> 00:56:58,740 argue that you have to embrace the contradiction of abolishing the system while empowering the practice of supporting the right of sex workers, 565 00:56:59,580 --> 00:57:06,270 rights of sex workers, but not the right to sex work of supporting the empowering practices of individual sex workers. 566 00:57:06,360 --> 00:57:08,700 But being against institutional prostitution itself. 567 00:57:09,990 --> 00:57:19,440 So, you know, there is there is this sort of contradictory hybrid position that has long been prevalent in feminist politics, 568 00:57:19,440 --> 00:57:24,150 which the state feminists in the Indian context were simply channelling. 569 00:57:25,380 --> 00:57:31,830 So what is problematic about this middle ground feminist position that it actually is impossible to operationalise in policy terms? 570 00:57:32,460 --> 00:57:37,350 Because how can one detract from the commercial aspect of the sex sector without hurting sex workers in sense? 571 00:57:38,310 --> 00:57:42,720 And how does one respect the rights of sex workers without indirectly supporting the system of sex work? 572 00:57:43,260 --> 00:57:46,409 So actually it's quite impossible to reconcile these two positions. 573 00:57:46,410 --> 00:57:54,300 And I think this is why there is a slippage between the statements of the minister and her more obviously abolitionist counterpart, 574 00:57:55,500 --> 00:57:56,580 the MP in Parliament. 575 00:57:57,130 --> 00:58:06,330 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, 576 00:58:06,330 --> 00:58:12,719 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, 577 00:58:12,720 --> 00:58:17,510 from the anti-sex book law. So the focus is on the trafficking bill rather than the sex work law. 578 00:58:17,530 --> 00:58:21,690 So there are no assurances by the minister that in fact the idea will be repeated. 579 00:58:22,260 --> 00:58:28,470 Instead, there is simply reference to a standard non-accidental clause which says where there is conflict between two provisions, 580 00:58:28,590 --> 00:58:32,219 between two laws, the trafficking bill will trump the IGP. 581 00:58:32,220 --> 00:58:37,980 But that's not really adequate assurances for for sex workers. 582 00:58:38,760 --> 00:58:44,969 So I just conclude by reflecting briefly on this relationship between the international and the domestic, 583 00:58:44,970 --> 00:58:57,900 because I think it's often assumed that there is a unidimensional or a soft power from international policy developments to the domestic level. 584 00:58:58,110 --> 00:59:06,450 And to some extent, it is true because, you know, obligations to enact anti-trafficking laws come from signing on to the trafficking protocol. 585 00:59:07,110 --> 00:59:12,120 And I've also shown how the TTIP reports, in fact, almost too good a Swedish model in this context. 586 00:59:13,290 --> 00:59:19,080 And over time, as international opinion broadened understanding of trafficking to go beyond sex trafficking, 587 00:59:19,530 --> 00:59:26,639 the Indian government pursued the same position. So in 2013, the standalone offence of trafficking actually is not restricted just to prostitution. 588 00:59:26,640 --> 00:59:30,630 It refers to other sectors as well. So there is some way in which, yes, 589 00:59:31,380 --> 00:59:36,510 domestic jurisdiction stick from the international domain and one has to always 590 00:59:36,510 --> 00:59:41,130 acknowledge the linkages fostered by what I think Gupta calls global governmentality, 591 00:59:41,580 --> 00:59:45,030 whereby both domestic and international students, civil society players, 592 00:59:45,030 --> 00:59:51,780 often interact with each other and with their counterparts from other countries and spaces of what Salima calls transnational modernity. 593 00:59:52,110 --> 00:59:58,530 They tend to often derive legitimation from each other. So when the two UN special approaches and trafficking. 594 00:59:58,910 --> 01:00:02,160 Contemporary Forms of slavery criticised the 2018 trafficking bill. 595 01:00:02,630 --> 01:00:11,810 In fact, the Minister said, well, you know, in fact when they presented the trafficking bill at a child labour conference in Argentina, 596 01:00:11,810 --> 01:00:14,000 many governments wanted to emulate the Indian model. 597 01:00:14,360 --> 01:00:23,540 So there's a way in which international governments, you know, influence what's happening domestically, but also the other way around. 598 01:00:24,230 --> 01:00:31,490 And but also the soft power, which is exercised by the international community, has not always been well received by the Indian government. 599 01:00:31,490 --> 01:00:34,820 So I think India, Brazil, many of these countries are similar in that sense. 600 01:00:35,360 --> 01:00:40,310 So for example, the government of India has long resented the tip ranking system and refuses to, 601 01:00:40,730 --> 01:00:44,090 you know, fill out questionnaires circulated by the US government. 602 01:00:44,420 --> 01:00:53,329 It has also vigorously protested the lifting of trafficking in terms of modern slavery and in fact has denied visas 603 01:00:53,330 --> 01:00:59,870 to researchers from the Work Free Foundation when they came to India to to produce the 2018 Global Slavery Index. 604 01:01:01,220 --> 01:01:07,370 But what is interesting is, for the most part, some of the most significant shifts in policy are often triggered by domestic developments. 605 01:01:07,420 --> 01:01:12,380 So so, for instance, the rape and murder duty finding was a domestic political opportunity. 606 01:01:12,860 --> 01:01:19,429 Similarly, once Section 370 was passed and you had a trafficking offence, it was a public interest law. 607 01:01:19,430 --> 01:01:23,480 So that really triggered the creation of a new trafficking bill. 608 01:01:23,900 --> 01:01:30,430 So what I want to argue is that political opportunity stripped a political opportunity structures that isn't a cheap local. 609 01:01:31,610 --> 01:01:38,510 And in fact, unlike in the West, trafficking in the Indian context has has not captured the imagination of the Indian public. 610 01:01:39,470 --> 01:01:49,970 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. 611 01:01:50,390 --> 01:01:57,530 So the relationship between the international and the national is quite a delicate dance and it's quite contingent rather than being determinative. 612 01:01:57,950 --> 01:02:06,560 So I want to conclude by by just saying that anti-trafficking discourse has morphed considerably over the past 20 years, 613 01:02:06,830 --> 01:02:14,420 with the term trafficking managing to do considerable work in holding together quite disparate costs and projects together. 614 01:02:14,840 --> 01:02:19,489 And it could be it could be a reference peripheral for, you know, global supply chains. 615 01:02:19,490 --> 01:02:23,890 It could be something to deal with forced marriage. 616 01:02:23,900 --> 01:02:26,030 It could be used to discuss sex trafficking. 617 01:02:26,750 --> 01:02:34,880 And the diet on the sexual politics, however, has moved, but far less compared to other issues of labour exploitation. 618 01:02:35,240 --> 01:02:40,670 And in the case of India, there's been some limited expansion of this understanding of trafficking to include bonded labour. 619 01:02:41,600 --> 01:02:46,370 However, the cost to the imagination of the ITP is has been channelled through the new trafficking bill, 620 01:02:47,000 --> 01:02:53,570 alongside of also neglect on the part of the state to a very rich jurisprudence around forced labour and bonded labour. 621 01:02:54,770 --> 01:02:58,459 And there is a politics of avoidance, CO2, labour exploitation. 622 01:02:58,460 --> 01:03:04,670 But that is something that I'm happy to to explain in the course of of.