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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. There is of course a very strong feminist tradition of the critique of liberalism including from radical feminists (such as the early Catharine MacKinnon and Carole Pateman), materialist feminists and postcolonial feminists.

  2. G.A. Res. 25, Annex II, U.N. GAOR, 55th Sess., Supp. No. 49, at 60, U.N. Doc. A/45/49 (Vol. I) (2001).

  3. Transnational Organized Crime, G.A. Res. 53/111, U.N. GAOR, 53rd Sess., 85th Plen. Mtg., U.N. Doc. A/RES/53/111 (1998).

  4. Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, Pub. L. No. 106-386, § 106, 114 Stat. 1464 (2000).

  5. Available at http://www.jus.uio.no/english/services/library/treaties/02/2-04/saarc-traff-women-children.xml.

  6. Secretary, Haryana State Electricity Board v. Suresh A.I.R. 1999 S.C. 1160.

  7. [1982] 2 S.C.R. 76.

  8. AIR 1982 S.C. 1473.

  9. Labourers Working on Salal Hydroelectric Project v. State of Jammu and Kashmir and Others (1983) 2 S.C.R. 181.

  10. supra n 7 at 78.

  11. Interpretive Notes for the official records (travaux preparatoires) of the negotiation of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the protocols thereto, U.N. Doc. A/55/383/Add.1.

  12. supra n 7 at 136.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK

    Prabha Kotiswaran

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Correspondence to Prabha Kotiswaran.

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Kotiswaran, P. Vulnerability in Domestic Discourses on Trafficking: Lessons from the Indian Experience. Fem Leg Stud 20, 245–262 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-012-9211-z

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