From ‘house of horrors’ to ‘sensitive’ governance: sex workers’ shelter detention in India

ABSTRACT

Indian law prescribes ‘protective custody’ for sex workers, placing them in carceral shelters after police and NGO-initiated raids and rescues. Frequent allegations of abuse and incidents of escape are followed by media and judicial scrutiny, leaving shelter detention itself unquestioned. This article situates shelter detention in two ways. It examines its legal prescription in the Indian socio-legal context and its connections to global anti-trafficking and anti-immigration contexts. It also engages with Foucauldian concepts and feminist, socio-legal, historical, and anthropological work on India to analyze the power shelter detention instantiates. Next, the article critiques shelter detentionby drawing upon my ethnography at a Mumbai shelter and reflections on methods and ethics, and by tracking how the media and judiciary responded to an escape. Through these methods, approaches, and findings, I argue that shelter detention curtails sex workers’ mobilities and impedes their livelihoods through: 1) Its legal prescription, authorizing multiple forms of governance; 2) Its implementation, shaped by challenges of governance delaying sex workers’ release; and 3) Media exposés and judicial interventions further intensifying surveillance. The article shows, further, that sex workers’ escapes and acts of resistance illuminate not just ‘exceptional’ abuse, but the routine, ever-expanding forms of governance animating shelter detention.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• law
• shelter detention
• postcolonial state
• NGOs
• sex trafficking
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the multiple interlocutors–the shelter staff, magistrates, NGO workers, and detained women–who shared their perspectives with me during my fieldwork. I am also grateful to the shelter administration and monitoring committee for permitting me access at a time when the shelter was under such intense scrutiny. Early versions of this article were presented at the Annual Conference of the American Ethnological Society in Boston (2014) and the South Asia by the Bay Graduate Student Conference (2014) at UC Santa Cruz, where it benefited from the insightful comments of Jennifer Musto and Anjali Arondekar as discussants. I also wish to acknowledge here the late Sally Merry, my PhD advisor, whose insights have shaped this article and my broader research immeasurably. The directions this article has taken were shaped during conversations with Mirna Guha and Kimberly Walters, co-guest editors for this Special Section, whose feedback on the article I deeply appreciate. Gowri Vijayakumar provided helpful comments as I revised the article. At various stages, this article has also benefited from conversations with and input from (Justice) S. Muralidhar, Pratiksha Baxi, Rohit De, Susan Coutin, and Sarah Whitt. Finally, I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful, nuanced, and engaged feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The city named Bombay in the colonial era was renamed Mumbai in 1995 by the Shiv Sena, a regional political party based on Hindu nationalism and local Maharashtrian nativism and Maratha identity. The High Court, however, has retained the colonial name.

2 The gang-rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi led to nation-wide protests and global attention to sexual violence in India, resulting in reforms of criminal law on violence against women.

3 For an overview of the case, see Salomi and Shukla 2018; Johari 2020.

4 This provision applies both to adults and to those below eighteen, though the shelters for adults and minors are separate.

5 See also Tambe (2009): 33-34.

6 See also Tambe (2009): xxiv.

7 Elena Shih discusses how women at a mandatory anti-trafficking shelter in China found the rules policing their behavior akin to those in dormitory housing for low-wage jobs (2023, 90).

8 See, for e.g., Amar 2013; Valverde 2008.

9 My interlocutors blamed land grabs for the mass raid of the ‘Simplex Building,’ from which 400 women were rescued from 75 brothels and brought to the shelter. For an account of real estate developers’ eviction of sex workers as they redevelop Mumbai’s red-light district into profitable real estate, see Shah (2014).

10 For critiques of forced raid-and-rescue operations, see Ahmed and Seshu (2012); Agnes (1996); Dasgupta (2019); Govindan (2013); Walters (2016).

11 Several raids thus target establishments merely suspected to be sites of prostitution.

12 For a critical analysis of U.S.-based Christian ‘justice’-oriented organizations in global anti-trafficking campaigns, see Bernstein (2018). For a critical analysis of one such organization in India, see Govindan (2013).

13 In Hindi, ‘Jahaan pe ladies log ko pakad ke laatey hain.’

14 This is stated in the Maharashtra State Rules implementing the ITPA.

15 It remains unclear to me whether Ruby was genuinely happy at the shelter for a short while or was presenting herself as such to please shelter staff.

16 Term for older sister also used to indicate respect towards a woman perceived to be of higher socio-economic status.

17 For more details on the multiple agencies involved in the repatriation of trafficked persons to Bangladesh, see Ganguly 2016, 87–88.

18 Under the ITPA, probation officers are appointed at protective homes to ‘inquire into the above circumstances and into the personality of the person and the prospects of his rehabilitation.'

19 Elena Shih’s observations of moral supervision at a Chinese shelter are uncannily similar (2023, 92).

20 Floor decorations with colored powder.

21 With the training offered being only for low-wage work and post-release employment options limited to working in risky labor conditions in garment factories, many rescued Bangladeshis choose to return to sex work (Bose 2018; Ganguly 2016).

22 By training them in low-wage work, anti-trafficking rehabilitation programs return sex workers to the poverty that many seek to overcome through sex work (Walters 2016, 59), keeping them ‘mired in manual and menial low-wage work’ (Shih 2023, 24).

23 Unlike the U.K. example, here no welfare support is provided on the condition of finding employment.

24 The rise of Hindu nationalism has fueled anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments against Bangladeshi migrants. Xenophobic political discourse around illegal immigrants misusing the generosity of the Indian state and threatening law and order (Moodie 2010) pervaded shelter detention. However, detailed discussion of its impacts is beyond the scope of this paper.

25 For an ethnographic exploration of expanding PIL jurisprudence, see Bhuwania (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation [grant number 8532].

Notes on contributors

Vibhuti Ramachandran

Vibhuti Ramachandran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. As an anthropologist of law, gender and sexuality, and South Asia, her research spans postcolonial law, state practices, critical approaches to human rights, humanitarianism, development, and NGOs, institutional responses to sex trafficking and labor trafficking, and intersections between gender, labor, childhood, and migration. Her book manuscript, ‘“Immoral Traffic:” Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India,’ supported by UCI’s Hellman Fellowship Award, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.