Immoral Traffic: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India

By Vibhuti Ramachandran, Assistant Professor, University of California, Irvine

Abstract

This insightful ethnography delves into the complex intersection of India’s anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns, and how they impact sex workers in both voluntary and involuntary situations. Immoral Traffic examines the role of legal actors and NGOs in implementing these interventions, revealing the mix of paternalism, humanitarianism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality in their efforts. Through a sequence of interventions prescribed by India’s anti-prostitution law, the book follows the experiences of sex workers, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters. It sheds light on the ways in which donor-driven NGOs draw upon this law to implement anti-trafficking agendas, and how these interventions are navigated by women removed from the sex trade. Detailed and eye- opening, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of anthropology, law and society, gender and sexuality studies, South Asian studies, global studies, and critical studies of NGOs and humanitarianism.

With readers Simanti Dasgupta, Professor of Anthropology, University of Dayton; Denise Brennan, Professor of Anthropology, Georgetown University; Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University; and Jennifer Musto, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Wellesley College.

About the Author

Vibhuti Ramachandran, Assistant Professor, University of California, Irvine

As an anthropologist of law, gender and sexuality, and South Asia, Vibhuti Ramachandran’s research spans postcolonial law, state practices, courts, policing, sexuality and governance, critical approaches to human rights and humanitarianism, NGOs and transnational activism, sex work, sex trafficking, labour and migration, regimes of care and carcerality, domestic work, child labour, and orphanhood in global contexts. Her interdisciplinary research, based on ethnographic methods and socio-legal analyses and rooted in critical feminist and postcolonial perspectives, is structured around two broad concerns.

• How postcolonial law, NGOs, and global anti- trafficking campaigns converge to imagine prostitution through the contrasting lenses of victimhood and immorality.
• How postcolonial law, NGOs, and global humanitarian campaigns converge to imagine childhood as a category of vulnerability.