publication

Tracing historical disruptions in the sex worker rights movement in late colonial and postcolon...

Authors:
Shriya Patnaik
2024

Despite the prostitution industry being partially decriminalised in India, the status of sex workers remains abysmal in the twenty-first century. The current approach to sex workers' rights is ridden with several structural barriers, as existing state rehabilitation projects often violate subjects' bodily autonomy and act as moral discipliners, leaving them vulnerable to institutionalised violence and social stigmatisation. Moreover, the children of sex workers are subject to rampant forms of societal segregation. However, there have been strong feminist movements in the recent decades advocating for the inclusion and rights of those at the margins of civil society. For example, NGOs made up of contemporary sex workers and social workers who advocate the legalisation of prostitution in India to target crime and stigma. The social workers from these NGOs (many sex workers themselves) champion the cause of sex workers as equal citizens, critiquing state rehabilitation projects based in moral discipline instead of strategies towards socio-economic empowerment or skill development. This chapter also addresses interviews conducted with sex workers from the Sonagachi district in Kolkata, alongside accounts from women involved in sexual commerce from Odisha, to consider the limits of non-participatory development projects and consider strategies for collective mobilisation. Alluding to the history of laws around the sex industry in India, it problematises existing criminalisation frameworks and calls for a bottom-up, inclusive approach.