Vulnerability in Domestic Discourses on Trafficking: Lessons from the Indian Experience

In recent years, rather than addressing the needs of sex workers themselves or of trafficked persons, international anti-trafficking law has been mobilised towards an ideological end, namely the abolition of sex work. The vulnerability of ??third world?? female sex workers in particular has provided a potent image for justifying state intervention backed by the full force of the criminal law. Moral legitimacy has been afforded to this by a radical feminist discourse which views sex workers as nothing but hapless victims. Drawing on the work of Martha Fineman and legal realists like Robert Hale, this article redeploys vulnerability in trafficking debates to depart from its narrative of victimhood and to offer a renewed critique of liberal legalism, which has in the trafficking context been characterised by legal strategies of criminalisation and the attendant rescue and rehabilitation of trafficked persons. Specifically, it examines how three Indian social legislations regulating bonded labour, contract labour and inter-state migrant labour, and targeted at the domestic trafficking of men, conceptualise vulnerability in substantially different ways when compared to the 2000 Palermo Protocol on Trafficking (at least as it has been enforced to date). To the extent that these Indian laws construe the vulnerability of labour as systemic, trafficking is understood as a problem of labour migration to be addressed primarily by labour law. As such, this view of vulnerability, I argue, not only helps to de-exceptionalise trafficking as always equivalent to the trafficking of women for sex work, and therefore sex work, but also to substantively address the vulnerability of both male and female workers in other labour markets.     

Born unto Brothels—Toward a Legal Ethnography of Sex Work in an Indian Red-Light Area

The global sex panic around sex work and trafficking has fostered prostitution law reform worldwide. While the normative status of sex work remains deeply contested, abolitionists and sex work advocates alike display an unwavering faith in the power of criminal law; for abolitionists, strictly enforced criminal laws can eliminate sex markets, whereas for sex work advocates, decriminalization can empower sex workers. I problematize both narratives by delineating the political economy and legal ethnography of Sonagachi, one of India's largest red-light areas. I show how within Sonagachi there exist highly internally differentiated groups of stakeholders, including sex workers, who, variously endowed by a plural rule network—consisting of formal legal rules, informal social norms, and market structures—routinely enter into bargains in the shadow of the criminal law whose outcomes cannot be determined a priori. I highlight the complex relationship between criminal law and sex markets by analyzing the distributional effects of criminalizing customers on Sonagachi's sex industry.     

Reckless’ passage to India: assessing the cross-national influence of American criminology

The contributions of American criminologist, Walter C. Reckless, to the development of the field of criminology and criminal justice in India are described. These are assessed in the light of recent debates about criminological knowledge transfer from developed to developing countries and regarding the influence of American criminology on its Asian counterparts.     

Sense-making and secondary victimization among unsolved homicide co-victims

Sense-making is a form of meaning-making that focuses on understanding loss which then contributes to identity reconstruction. This qualitative study examines how perceived communication with the criminal justice system can inhibit sense-making among unsolved homicide co-victims. One-time intensive interviews were conducted with 37 co-victims about their interactions with police and prosecutors. A grounded theory approach suggest that co-victims held negative views of the police and prosecutors because they perceived them as inhibiting their ability to adequately locate information needed to understand the crime and achieve justice. Results also suggest that race and ethnicity play a role in reducing sense-making because constructions of meaning were based on perceptions of discrimination. In the end, the intense desire for information, resolution, and justice led several co-victims to investigate their loved one's murder. Policies that law enforcement should adopt to promote better communication with co-victims and facilitate sense-making are examined.     

Labours in Vice or Virtue? Neo-liberalism, Sexual Commerce, and the Case of Indian Bar Dancing

Of late, the Indian state has adopted an abolitionist stance towards sex work and bar dancing. This article argues that although in the Indian state of Maharashtra, the judicial overturning of the ban against bar dancing has been celebrated by feminists as a triumph of women's right to livelihood over patriarchal demands of women's sexual morality, the judgment is predicated on a sharp distinction between morally 'good' and 'bad' female labour, namely, bar dancing and sex work. This is ironic given their striking sociological similarities and the stigmatization and levels of state abuse inflicted against both. The article considers the usefulness of the totalizing logic of neo-liberalism for explaining the increased judicial and feminist tolerance for bar dancing. The article argues that prospects for redistributive law reform for all sexual workers are dim unless the arbitrary legal distinctions drawn between markets in female sexual labour are overcome.     

Sharing Norm Pressures and Community Remittances: Evidence from a Natural Disaster in the Pacific Islands

Abstract

Migrants are often subject to social pressures to remit beyond their own households, to share the benefits of migration with the wider community in their home country; these are ‘community remittances’. We hypothesise that community sharing norm pressures are stronger in locations with more extensive home community networks. We also postulate that the responsiveness of remittances to sharing pressures is subject to diminishing returns, attributable to a donor fatigue effect. Using customised survey data from three Polynesian migrant groups in metropolitan and regional Australia, we estimate double-hurdle regression models of community remittances. To identify the effects of sharing norm pressures we exploit an exogenous (cyclone) shock to home country incomes affecting one sub-group. We find strong evidence in support of the postulated responsiveness of community remittances to location-related differences in sharing norm pressures, and the presence of a donor fatigue effect. The policy implications are discussed.