Chapter 5 focuses on NGO-assisted judicial inquiries with rescued women in the magistrate’s chambers at the Mumbai Special Court. These inquiries, prescribed by the ITPA, seek details about rescued women’s backgrounds and entry into the sex trade. Based on the information women provide, magistrates make decisions about their custody – either sending them back to their families or to shelters and economic rehabilitation programs. Per the ITPA, these decisions are based not on the consent or preferences of rescued adult women, but on the evaluations magistrates make. The chapter demonstrates how inquiries do not merely seek information, but use the tactics of counseling and censure to evaluate identity and kinship. It shows how inquiries are framed both by accusations of immorality and by concerns about victimhood, and how women respond with narratives centered on poverty and kinship. By focusing on this site and process, the chapter illuminates how female judges and NGO workers combine state paternalism, moral reform, sexual humanitarianism, and immigration control in the governance of prostitution. The chapter also shows how Bangladeshi women are targeted by, and navigate, a culture of suspicion and regime of documentation that brings anti-trafficking, anti-prostitution, and anti-immigration imperatives together.

The introduction explains the setting of the ethnography at the intersections of law, NGOs, the Indian state, and the global anti-trafficking regime. It explains the sequence of interventions the book will follow, from rescues to courts to shelters, prescribed by Indian law and implemented by legal actors and NGOs. It lays out the sites and processes the book will explore through encounters between those implementing these interventions, and those experiencing them. It outlines the book’s central aims: how it uses the intersections of anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution interventions as points of entry to foreground how sex workers navigate them, critique the prevalent assumptions and preferred solutions of the global anti-trafficking regime, and explore the complex relationship between law and NGOs in India. It discusses the broader concerns and approaches these interventions bring to the governance of prostitution – global humanitarianism, policing and criminal justice, the paternalism of the Indian state and NGOs, neoliberal women’s empowerment programs, and an anti-immigrant sociopolitical climate. The introduction also explains the author’s methods, research design, and positionality, and the organization of the book.

Chapter 1 provides the contextual and conceptual frameworks shaping the book. It explains the sociolegal context in which the book is situated – in particular, India’s Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA) of 1956, the US-led anti-trafficking regime, and the role of anti-trafficking NGOs. Conceptually, Chapter 1 lays out how the book places postcolonial law in a broader field of neoliberal government including state agencies and foreign-funded NGOs acting upon prostitution. It explains how the book pursues new directions in legal anthropology with an attentiveness to multiple scales of governance and law’s implementation by state and nonstate actors, while remaining deeply rooted in the minutiae of legal practices and spaces. Finally, Chapter 1 shows how the book is in dialogue with interdisciplinary feminist scholars who have critiqued anti-trafficking campaigns and provided nuanced ethnographic insights on the complexities of sex workers’ lives. It explains how, unlike these studies, this book is not an ethnography of sex work, sex trafficking, or even of anti-trafficking interventions alone. Instead, it explores how India’s anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns converge and act upon sex workers, and how sex workers navigate and resist them.

The US-driven and NGO-mediated prosecutorial approach to address trafficking prioritizes efforts to convict the accused and foregrounds victim-witness testimony as the central piece of evidence to do so. Though training rescued women to testify against alleged traffickers is thus a key component of donor-driven NGOs’ efforts, the author’s ethnographic research revealed that this is a rare occurrence. This chapter explores the multiple and complex reasons why most rescued women don’t testify, by situating them in the broader Indian sociolegal context. In juxtaposition, it tracks the case of a trafficked woman, Sunaina Das, who testified for the prosecution in a New Delhi trial court, to also explore the constellation of factors that lead some women to testify and the challenges they face. It follows Sunaina’s encounters with the Indian criminal justice system and the support she received from both NGOs and Indian legal actors. Finally, it explores how an NGO-led training session for Indian judges impacted her case. Through these contributions, this chapter challenges prevalent assumptions in global anti-trafficking campaigns about the victimhood of Global South sex workers, about criminal justice necessarily benefiting trafficked sex workers, and about the Indian criminal justice system necessarily lacking the ability to address sex trafficking.

Chapter 2 highlights how rescues are swift and chaotic events, fraught with confusion and uncertainty, tensions between NGOs and police, and a range of choices sex workers make, from actively pursuing their escape, to resisting rescues. The chapter, rooted in ethnographic observations and a comparison of two rescues, brings forth how they are shaped by questions, uncertainties, tensions, and choices that are rarely acknowledged in mainstream media and policy representations of rescues. It builds upon and departs from existing feminist critiques to foreground the tensions between NGOs and police, rooted in different gendered moral frameworks, interpretations of the law, resources, and priorities of intervention. It explores how NGOs and police constantly negotiate these tensions, and examines their impact on the construction, navigation, and contestation of victimhood. Comparing two very different NGO-led rescues in New Delhi and Meerut, it also brings forth how the experiences, choices, and approaches of women’s entry into the sex trade, and the outcomes they seek, vary greatly.

This multisited ethnography is not about sex work or sex trafficking, or even about anti-trafficking campaigns alone. Instead, as an anthropologist of law, NGOs, and the Indian state, the author situates the governance of prostitution in the broader Indian sociolegal and global humanitarian contexts. The book illuminates how Indian law and global anti-trafficking campaigns come together to govern prostitution, combining humanitarianism, paternalism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality. It explores the consequences of US-funded anti-trafficking campaigns operating alongside India’s existing legal framework against prostitution, and highlights the significant role NGOs play in suturing and implementing both kinds of interventions. At the same time, the book tracks how women removed from the sex trade – some of whom were trafficked and others voluntary sex workers – navigate these overlapping interventions. The title Immoral Traffic comes from India’s anti-prostitution law, which donor-driven NGOs draw upon to implement their anti-trafficking agenda. This law’s provisions and procedures to “manage” prostitution, and NGOs’ efforts to deploy and extend them, feature centrally throughout the book. Immoral Traffic takes the reader along the sequence of interventions this law prescribes and sex workers experience, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters.