On Positionality, Ethics and the Morals of Fieldwork: An Interview with Vibhuti Ramachandran

SLR recently spoke via email with Vibhuti Ramachandran, associate professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine, about her new book Immoral Traffic, which is an ethnography of the intersection of India’s anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns, which impact sex workers’ lives in India through NGOs, the state in its various manifestations, and overarching mores and prejudices surrounding sex work. In this conversation, we focus on the ethnographic process behind her work, and the performances and positionalities that the ethnographer must adopt in order to navigate the conflicting truths, vulnerabilities and bureaucratic apathy that this intersection engenders.  

You mention that you managed to gain access to certain sites such as police stations, magistrate’s chambers, and shelters by performing volunteer tasks. Did this dual role of researcher and participant shape your interactions, the data you collected, and how was your ethnography impacted by the power dynamics at play when perhaps being perceived as an extension of NGO and state apparatus?

I conducted most of the ethnographic research for this book in legal institutions like courts and shelters, or while accompanying police and NGO teams on “raid and rescue” operations. To do so, it was important to gain permission and trust from the concerned state authorities, magistrates, police,  and NGO leaders. Building rapport took time. Like most ethnographers, what helped me was “hanging out” for extended periods of time at these sites. Those who allowed me to observe them could discern my deep interest in understanding the sites and processes involved. At the same time, I would not have been able to get the kind of research access I did without offering, and being expected to offer,  something in return. I was comfortable performing some of those tasks, such as rapporteuring and providing research assistance to NGOs and at times, government agencies and judicial magistrates.

However, as I describe in the book, other tasks I was expected to perform as a volunteer closed the distance I wanted to maintain in my participant observation of these institutions, hindered the possibilities of building rapport with the women these interventions sought to simultaneously assist and discipline, and presented several ethical dilemmas I had to navigate as an anthropologist and feminist scholar. I was asked to play an active part in the raid-and-rescue operations, “counsel” women removed from the sex trade, and participate in certain court processes that typically involved NGO assistance. As NGOs, police teams, and courts were often short-staffed, and I was always around and available, I was often asked to step into these roles.

Participating in these processes gave me rich insights into the social hierarchies and power dynamics shaping the interactions between Indian legal actors and NGOs on the one hand, and women removed from the sex trade on the other. However, I was profoundly uncomfortable at the prospect of participating in the very forms of punitive paternalism that I was critiquing. I found ways to navigate it, for instance, in my approach to asking questions, in maintaining a non-judgmental tone, and in listening rather than offering the morally laced blend of advice and admonition that structured these interactions. I also found ways to build rapport with sex workers subjected to these processes—for instance, by finding activities within the approved scope of my role as a volunteer that would be of some interest to them. The film screenings I discuss in Chapter 6 are one example.

Yet, it is important to acknowledge how inhabiting the role of a volunteer led to my being perceived as an extension of the NGO and state apparatus, as you phrased it. The sex workers I encountered always saw me accompanying the NGO team, assisting a magistrate, or working under the supervision of the shelter superintendent. They absolutely saw me as an authority figure, one of the many “didis” or “madams” who would lecture them about how to live their lives or play a role in deciding their fate.  On the one hand, this positionality gave me many insights into how they presented their narratives to authority figures, tailoring them according to their perceptions of what such figures would expect. On the other hand, it hindered my ability to build rapport with them in the way I might have been able to had I met them in a different space or context.

You have also spoken about your ethical dilemmas in balancing yourself as a volunteer with your own anthropological inquiry. What lessons would you emphasise for ethnographers seeking to study similar carceral or humanitarian spaces, especially when engaging with those perceived as lying by the authorities?

I have discussed my positionality at length in the Introduction and throughout the book, based on the reasons described above. As an ethnographer, I consider questions around access, ethics, and positionality as important to discuss as the findings or conclusions of the  research. I found it imperative to acknowledge that my positionality as a reluctant authority figure shaped the way I was perceived in my fieldsites, and what people shared or did not share with me. As the ethnography was multi-sited, with each chapter in the book focusing on a different site, each chapter includes a discussion of how I gained research access, what tasks I was expected to do, and how I navigated the ethical challenges and dilemmas posed by the dual roles of anthropologist and volunteer.

It is also important to acknowledge that these issues are messy and complex, and can linger and remain unresolved. Several aspects of my ethnography became possible precisely because of my being, albeit temporarily, reluctantly, and uncomfortably, part of the expanded regime governing prostitution. I found some ways to navigate the expectations—by prioritizing listening over speaking, under-performing some responsibilities, not replicating several aspects of the hierarchical interactions I observed, and finding more informal ways to build rapport. Yet, my strategies and solutions were never perfect, and I resolved to place those imperfections and lingering dilemmas at the center of the ethnography. I was never able to really “balance” the role of volunteer with that of participant observer, nor did I believe I could. But I do think those tensions and struggles have helped me understand and explain the forms of power, morality, and bureaucracy shaping the anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution interventions I observed more viscerally.

For instance — and this will also help address the last part of the question — I was sometimes expected to participate in inquiries or counseling sessions with women who were perceived to be “lying” when they told the police, magistrate, or NGO that they had not been trafficked, or in some cases, were not even involved with the sex trade. When briefed, I was explicitly told to suspect their accounts and dig deeper, in order to elicit the “real truth”— presumed to be that they were trafficked. I did not, of course, approach my conversations with such suspicions and presumptions, choosing instead to listen to the accounts the women gave me. But along with my observations of the way Indian legal actors and NGOs interacted with women removed from the sex trade, the instructions and advice they gave me about how to approach these interactions provided considerable insights into their work. They helped illuminate how such tactics of “truth-seeking” coursed through these interventions, and how deeply they were shaped by suspicions and presumptions about women’s agency and sexuality. Readers will find these discussions especially in Chapters 2, 3, and 5 of the book.

Interestingly, bureaucracy and regimes of documentation also played a role in these politics of truth production. Suspicions prevailed not only about women’s status as trafficked or involved in prostitution, but also about the identities and documents they presented. Those intervening in these cases often asked aloud certain questions and prevailing anxieties about the women before them: were the women actually married or related to the people who came to claim their custody (as required by the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act of 1956)? If the women were Bengali speaking, could they be Bangladeshi women trying to “pass” as Indian? Identities were thus assessed, proved, or questioned based on not just moral concerns about prostitution, but the broader socio-legal context in which I did my research — the documentary practices and “familial ideology” of the postcolonial Indian state, and the deeply xenophobic “demographic anxieties” around Bangladeshi immigrants in India. So that is another lesson here — to be attentive to how the institutions and processes one is studying are shaped by longstanding legal histories and broader socio-political currents.

I also firmly believe that in order to understand the possibilities and challenges of doing ethnographic research in these contexts, it is helpful to step out of one’s immediate field sites and questions and engage with the work of other scholars. I found it incredibly helpful to read — and re-read — rich ethnographies preceding my own, such as Miriam Ticktin’s work on humanitarianism and Mahuya Bandyopadhyay’s work on carceral institutions, as discussed in the book. Pratiksha Baxi’s and Srimati Basu’s ethnographies were also deeply valuable in thinking about the way gendered assumptions play out in Indian courts. Though I had read some of these books prior to doing my research, I found myself returning to them while writing the book, to help think through the intricacies and dynamics of these socio-legal contexts, and questions around methods and positionality. Two new books on the harms of anti-trafficking in other global contexts — Elena Shih’s work on China and Thailand and Stacey Vanderhurst’s on Nigeria — were published as I was finalizing my manuscript and were incredibly useful to read. The similarities across their ethnographic contexts and mine were so uncanny. Engaging with their work revealed how, notwithstanding the specificities of each context, the intersection of U.S.-funded anti-trafficking campaigns and paternalist state institutions and practices across different global contexts seem to follow the same playbook.

The book deals with multiple conflicting narratives from the rescued women, NGOs and state actors. How did you as an ethnographer approach the task of interpreting these diverse “truths”, especially considering the fact that official accounts often pathologise sex workers’ own stories?

There is a rich and growing sub-field of feminist ethnographies of sex work in India. I have learned a great deal from the work of scholars like Prabha Kotiswaran, Svati Shah, Simanti Dasgupta, and Kimberly Walters on sex workers’ lived experiences, political economy, labor and migration, and rights advocacy. I also found it useful to read the work of Gowri Vijayakumar and Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, who have shown how sex worker groups’ involvement with HIV/ AIDS interventions efforts has shaped their increased political mobilization, rights claims, and advocacy for legal reform. My work is very much in conversation with all of these authors, but unlike them, my focus is not on the sites where sex is sold, the lived experiences of sex workers, or spaces and practices of sex worker activism. Instead, the book examines encounters between sex workers and state agents, legal actors, and NGO workers at sites and processes where anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking interventions meet. The ethnography is based on what was observable at the sites and processes I studied — police stations, NGO offices, courts, and a state-run shelter. As I did not conduct ethnography in sex workers’ homes, communities, places of work, or at sites and moments when they entered the sex trade, I cannot claim to know what their lives were like in the sex trade or the extent of choice and/or coercion they experienced. Indeed, as anthropologist Svati Shah has observed in their ethnography of migrant women workers in Mumbai, sexual commerce is not necessarily or easily “knowable” even in the spaces where sex is solicited and sold. Therefore, it was even less knowable in the contexts I studied, where women were aware that any information they provided would be used to shape judicial decisions about their custody and ability to earn a livelihood.

As I emphasize in the introduction, I am not interested in questions of authenticity and credibility, but rather, how these qualities are enacted and perceived in socio-legal spaces. I do not claim or seek to answer whether or not the women at the different sites and processes I observed were trafficked or what their identities “really” were. I explore, instead, how they presented their accounts to NGOs, state agents, and legal actors, how they were perceived, engaged, and processed, and how they navigated these interactions. My ethnographic accounts cover a spectrum of coercion, choice, and denial in the narratives that Indian and Bangladeshi women removed from the sex trade presented to state agents, legal actors, and NGO representatives. Paying attention to their accounts helped me foreground a politics of truth production, rather than ponder the authenticity or inauthenticity of narratives.

To center the politics of truth production, it was equally important to observe and analyze how these accounts were perceived by those processing these cases. Their search for a presumptive “truth” about victimhood reflected the potent amalgam of suspicion, pathologization, and pity marking the intersections of anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution interventions. The interactions I observed were shaped by a constitutive tension between perceived victimhood and perceived immorality. It was only in cases where the women readily and explicitly provided accounts of being trafficked that they were believed to be telling the “truth.” There, too, they were sometimes judged harshly for not “knowing better,” not escaping, or not seeking help sooner, as I show in Chapter 2.  In cases where they chose not to testify, said they had entered the sex trade by choice, denied being trafficked, or denied even participating in paid sex, they were presumed to be “lying” to protect themselves from punitive outcomes such as shelter detention and forced rehabilitation, moral censure, ongoing economic need, and/or the revenge of an alleged trafficker. In all of these instances, the very hint of a woman demonstrating agency was treated as pathological, as Claudia Aradau has argued. Any agentive act — from the pursuit of coveted consumer goods to romance, from denying victimhood to refusing assistance, deviated too much from the figure of the innocent, suffering victim in need of rescue and assistance.

Overall, the book places the expectations of “truth” and accusations of “lies” within the converging paternalisms of anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution interventions.

You also track the afterlives of rescue through judicial archives and everyday bureaucratic practices; drawing from this, did you gain any insights on production and the preservation of legal memory? Is this process of production and preservation complicated by the subject of the archives, i.e., narratives of rescue of sex workers?

Most researchers I know who have worked in legal institutions have a wealth of stories about bureaucratic nightmares while conducting fieldwork and accessing archives and documents. What came to mind when I read this question were the challenges I faced in procuring the court orders I analyze in Chapters 3 and 4. I conducted research for this book across two cities — New Delhi and Mumbai. Magistrates’ Courts were among my field sites in both cities. At the time I did my fieldwork in New Delhi in 2012-13, I was able to download court orders related to Sunaina Das’ case. This is the case I discuss extensively in Chapter 3, where a survivor of sex trafficking made substantial efforts against several odds to strengthen the prosecution case against an accused brothel madam.

However, the magistrate’s court I observed in Mumbai did not, at the time, have the facilities or resources to make judicial orders available online. Anyone who was not involved in the cases had to apply for physical copies, which was an extremely tedious process. I was occasionally able to get copies of orders from a few NGO lawyers I had gotten to know at the court. But for the most part, since I was not associated with an NGO during my Mumbai fieldwork, I had to write a separate application to the court office for each order. Then, I had to stand in long lines to buy stamps to attach to each application, and thereafter, pay for the photocopies, for which I had to maintain the good favor of the overworked and often reluctant court staff. Thankfully, I was joined by a fellow researcher who was doing her MPhil from TISS, Mumbai at the time and was also observing the same court. Ethnography can be such a lonely process, so I was truly fortunate to have someone to share the process, laughs, and frustrations with. She and I decided to divide up the cases among ourselves and shared the task of applying for them. Even so, the process of collecting the judgments, which could only be done during the hours the court was open, was exhausting, and would take time away from observing the court. I am recounting this aspect of my fieldwork here (and have done so in the book) not to elicit sympathy, but to illustrate the stark contrast to what I am about to describe next.

After going through this tedious process for several months, toward the second half of my fieldwork in Mumbai, we suddenly got all the orders we needed on a USB drive! What led to this was somewhat unrelated to my research, yet shaped it in quite an unexpected and significant way. Widespread protests at the gang-rape and murder of a young physiotherapy student in December 2012 had, as we know, led to calls for a nationwide evaluation of the Indian criminal justice system in cases of violence against women. In the early months of 2013, the Maharashtra Judicial Academy began to seek information on trial courts’ conviction and acquittal patterns. It ordered all courts dealing with gender violence cases to conduct and provide a detailed analysis. Though the court I was observing focused on prostitution cases under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA), it was interestingly included in this ambit. The already overburdened court staff was struggling to complete this additional task, so my fellow researcher and I were recruited to help complete the analysis of judicial orders. As regular “hangers on” at the court, we suddenly became useful. As we needed to access the court orders for our research anyway, this worked out very well for all concerned.

The long and short of these contrasting experiences of procuring judgments is to say that what becomes available, and how, can be shaped by factors ranging from how one’s utility in the field is perceived, to seemingly distant events and their consequences: factors that are seemingly disparate, yet become unexpectedly connected.

Navigating the ethical complexities of representing sex workers is a big challenge. These ethical complexities can vary from the vulnerability of participants, obtaining and evaluating consent, the risk of retraumatisation, misrepresentation, and confidentiality concerns. You touch upon an aspect of this in Chapter 6, where you write on how the women’s politics of refusal against attempts to “rescue” them was itself an entry point to understand the harms of shelterdetention prescribed by the law. How did you approach the politics of representation, and how did your positionality influence your understanding of who counts as a “credible” speaker?

I have already addressed the issue of my positionality, and many aspects of the politics of representation in my responses to previous questions. So I will focus here on the question of refusal.       On the day I began my research at a shelter in Mumbai where sex workers were detained in the name of protection, a woman named Ruby refused to talk to me. I had recognized her from an initial visit six months ago when I visited the shelter to inquire about doing research there. At that time, she had been eager to share her story with me. She had voluntarily migrated from Bangladesh to find work in India, but was trafficked to a brothel in Grant Road (in Mumbai’s red-light area) where she did not know she would be forced to provide sex. She was later rescued by a police and NGO team, and hoped to find a different way to make a living. The magistrate’s court had, per established legal procedure, but against Ruby’s wishes, ordered her repatriation to Bangladesh. Though Ruby did not want to work in the sex trade, she did want to make a better living in India than was possible for her in Bangladesh.

In the six months that had passed between my initial encounter with Ruby and this visit, she, along with several other Bangladeshi women, was still awaiting her release from “protective custody” at the shelter and repatriation to Bangladesh. Along with her migrant aspirations being curtailed, she was expected to participate in reform and rehabilitation programs with no means of earning a livelihood. Six months after my initial visit, there was still no sign of release orders, travel permits, or required police escort for Ruby and her compatriots to be able to leave the shelter. Such uncertainties and delays — rooted in the procedural bureaucracy of the postcolonial state — were typical, and were exacerbated in the case of Bangladeshi women because of the additional procedures involved in repatriation.

Ruby had no interest in speaking to me, someone she perceived as yet another “didi” or “madam” representing the expanded regime of governance that had incarcerated her in the name of rescue. Her eagerness to share her story during our first encounter was replaced by a refusal to engage with me when she anticipated being asked yet another set of questions about how she had entered the sex trade.  I was, of course, already aware of the harms shelter detention caused to women removed from the sex trade — whether trafficked or voluntary sex workers. But there was something visceral and palpable about the perceptible shifts in Ruby’s willingness to engage across these two meetings that connected the dots between her migration journey, prolonged detention, and refusal to speak. While I remain immensely grateful to the women who were willing to speak with me, I also learned a great deal from the silences and refusals of those, like Ruby, who were not.

Ruby’s refusal to speak, in anticipation of my asking her questions, became a point of entry through which to understand the everyday acts of women’s resistance to ill thought-out rescue-and-rehabilitation plans. It signified her resistance to participate in knowledge production, which she recognized as a mechanism of power in the governance of prostitution and policing of migrants. What moved me to center refusal as part of a politics of representation was the work of scholars like Audra Simpson, and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, whose call to pay ethnographic attention to refusal has stayed with me.

In your conclusion, you analyse the draft anti-trafficking legislations and argue that they carry forward the short-comings of the existing Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act. Do you foresee these legislations effectively de-conflating anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution interventions? Do you anticipate an evolution of the dynamics between the state, NGOs, and sex workers either in protesting against the law or in its implementation?

I describe this situation in the Conclusion as the expanded scope of an old framework. In the years since I completed my ethnographic research, there have been concerted efforts from government agencies and NGOs in India to introduce legislation dealing with human trafficking beyond the sex industry. The draft legislations have a broader definition of human trafficking (including issues such as child labor, bonded labor, forced marriage, and forced surrogacy), on the premise that the ITPA is singularly focused on prostitution. This is a welcome move if it serves to de-exceptionalize sexual commerce as the only context of human trafficking, or considers more broad-ranging structural solutions rather than punitive interventions. However, the long-standing anti-prostitution framework under the ITPA continues to shape the rescue-and-rehabilitation procedures these draft legislations rely on. The new proposed legislations do not address the harms of this framework and its associated procedures. Instead, they extend the scope of institutions like “protective homes,” the harms of which are well documented at this point, to newer target populations — survivors of “human trafficking” more broadly defined. Similarly, several other provisions are lifted from the ITPA, without considering the ways in which they police rather than assist those labeled as “victims,” and without heed to the voices of sex worker rights groups and activists who have been speaking out against the ITPA for decades.

As for the dynamics between the state and NGOs, what’s interesting is that the ITPA law has always envisaged and depended upon a certain kind of NGO intervention. Historians of late colonial India have shown how women’s groups — predecessors of the current NGO form — have long played a role in efforts to curb prostitution and “reform fallen women.” As I discuss in the book, the ITPA explicitly requires “respectable” members of “social welfare organizations” to assist the state in removing women from the sex trade, and in subsequent procedures to process, question, detain, protect, and reform them. Over the past two decades or so, anti-trafficking NGOs, many with U.S. funding, have smoothly stepped into this role. These NGOs continue to be a driving force in shaping the new, expanded anti-trafficking legislation. They have developed and maintained close working relationships with government ministries and lawmakers. This is especially significant in the contemporary context where there has been a political crackdown on civil society organizations through the increased regulation of foreign-funded NGOs. NGOs, as a broader category, are in a precarious position. Some have, in the name of suspicions around “anti-national” or “anti-development” activities, lost their licenses and funding. As far as I am aware, this targeting of NGOs in India does not seem to have impacted anti-trafficking NGOs thus far, despite their foreign funding rendering them possible targets of state suspicion and regulation. This speaks to the central role these NGOs have played in the history and contemporary implementation of the ITPA. But it remains to be seen what the future has in store.

Your previous work has dealt with the politics around rescuing young migrant girls from Jharkhand who are brought to New Delhi as domestic workers. The focus of both your works then, is on persons (migrant children and sex workers) who are imagined as helpless, vulnerable, and exploited by the law and institutions such as NGOs. The law very often treats women on par with children in their need to be protected by the law. Is this assumption complicated by your work? How would you contrast your learnings about agency and representation from Immoral Traffic with your insights from your work on child labour?

One of the NGOs whose anti-trafficking work I followed during my research for the book also worked on labor trafficking, especially on the issue of young migrants from Jharkhand brought by “placement agencies” to do domestic labor in New Delhi. I had the opportunity to observe some rescue operations in this context as well, leading to another set of research interests on childhood, labor, and migration. As explored in this article, I did find several parallels between this context and my primary ethnographic research on the governance of prostitution, not least the role of anti-trafficking NGOs across both contexts. There were several other themes and questions in common with the book — how to ascertain whether someone has been trafficked, different perceptions on what constitutes trafficking and exploitation, the complexities of age determination in India, and the fraught relationships between NGOs, the police, and judicial bodies.

There was, indeed, an infantilization of adult women at my field sites for the book. There was also a tendency among legal actors (and to some extent, NGOs) to perceive younger-looking women as victims, and older-looking women as immoral and criminal, even in cases where the latter said they were trafficked. This aspect of sexual humanitarianism, along with my observations of the contested politics around the rescue of young migrant workers, has led me to two parallel research tracks on law, NGOs, and humanitarianism: how they converge to imagine prostitution through the contrasting lenses of victimhood and immorality, and how they converge to imagine childhood as a category of vulnerability. In fact, I am now exploring the theme of childhood, work, and humanitarianism in my current research project, which examines how the issue of child labor has been constructed by experts, activists, and the state in India over the past four decades. The connection to concerns about child trafficking is relatively new — over the past two decades, so it is part of a longer history I am exploring through archival research, oral histories, and interviews.

In Chapter 4, you detail the ‘choreography of trials’ where the prosecution attempts to prove prostitution through presentation of meticulous evidence, elaborate reenactments, and testimonies by ‘respectable’ NGO activists. These are replete with moralistic assumptions about the rescued women, their sexual histories, and their participation in prostitution. With the rise of digital platforms and different modes of solicitation, how do you see these theatrics of trial evolving? Do you see moralistic narratives underpinning these procedures continuing or would they be difficult to sustain?

In the book, I explain how sex trafficking was difficult to prove, especially if the rescued women in those cases did not testify, or did not support the prosecution case. Indeed, I found that it was rare for rescued women to testify against the accused madams, pimps, brothel managers etc., though they sometimes did with NGOs’ support and encouragement, as this was a high priority for NGOs and their donors. I won’t get further into that very important aspect of the book so as not to digress here. At the Mumbai anti-prostitution court, however, I found that rescued women’s testimony was only one (albeit significant) factor shaping the outcomes of trials against the accused. This was because, as I show, evidence and testimony at this court is presented to prove prostitution, more so than sex trafficking. Having said I wouldn’t digress, I should briefly mention that sex trafficking is not easy to prove in other global contexts as well. A study of human trafficking cases in the U.S. found, for instance, that only a small number of such cases are prosecuted, and suspects are rarely convicted of trafficking offenses. I was recently following the trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs in the U.S., who, while accused of sex trafficking among other charges, was ultimately convicted only for transportation for prostitution.

Let me get back to how the trials I observed in my research were centered on proving prostitution.  At the court I observed in Mumbai, NGOs, police, and other witnesses participated in what I call the choreography of these trials, aimed at replicating the raid in the courtroom to prove that prostitution took place. The police case was built on a documentation of the raid that was carefully reenacted by the prosecution.  Adhering to the provisions of the ITPA, the Evidence Act and the Code of Criminal Procedure, the prosecution set out to prove what was found and said during the police raid. The prosecutor would ask witnesses to describe the circumstances leading up to the raid, provide details of the raids and the premises where they were conducted, identify the accused, and verify that the physical items of evidence (cash, packets of condoms and tissues, documents, ledgers, etc.) being presented in court in sealed envelopes were the ones recovered during the raid. The witnesses were expected to attest to the fact that a decoy customer (working with the police team) selected a woman, paid money for her to the accused, and took her into a room where she was later found “half naked,” through which an inference of prostitution was made. The presentation of the prosecution case in court thus centered on reenacting the transactional aspects of prostitution uncovered (and indeed catalyzed) by the raid. The marked currency notes, decoy customer, and panch witness whose testimony could prove this transaction were of prime importance. The prosecution case also centered on describing features of the premises that associated them with a brothel through deeply moralistic presumptions, e.g. condom packets and tissue paper found together, beds, partitioned rooms, and women being found “half-naked.”

Thus, the prosecution case at this court was about the characteristics of the space and the transactions and movements through which an inference of prostitution could be made. I have not explored the role of digital platforms and technologies in the solicitation and sale of sex, as I have moved on to a completely different project. But I think this is a wonderful question richly deserving of ethnographic research. What would evidence and testimony look like in such cases? How would intentionality and transactions be proved or contested? The trials I observed were so centered on proving that the place where the raid was conducted was a brothel. And indeed, the definition of a brothel is so central to the imagination of prostitution in the ITPA. I am certainly very curious about how raids, brothels, and other aspects of these trials would be reimagined by the police and prosecution trying to prove sexual commerce in the context of digital platforms and new technologies.

As the controversies in the U.S. around websites like Backpage have shown, these platforms can involve sexual exploitation and trafficking, but can also facilitate safer ways for voluntary sex workers to make a living than street-based work. Having seen how this has played out in the U.S., I am concerned that though the possibility of sex trafficking on online platforms will be addressed due to pressure from NGOs, as it certainly should, the voices of voluntary sex workers who use these platforms to avoid riskier ways to meet clients will not be brought to the table, and they will be deprived of their livelihoods. Even in cases of online sex trafficking, unless the whole legal framework is overhauled, improved detection mechanisms will not change the deeply flawed and deleterious post-rescue procedures that further victimize the women involved.

Finally, how did engaging with these complicated narratives of rescue and victimhood evolve or shift your personal worldview? What were the specific assumptions or principles from your disciplinary background that you had to unlearn through the course of your work?

Before I began my ethnographic research for this book, I was already familiar with the vexed feminist debates between radical or abolitionist feminists who consider prostitution inherently coercive and violent toward women and thus synonymous with trafficking, and pro-sex work feminists and sex worker rights groups who consider consensual sexual labor a legitimate means to earn a living. I was also familiar with how these debates played out in the context of NGOs, feminist politics, and sex worker collectives in India. I came to my research having read the work of Elizabeth Bernstein, Jennifer Musto, Prabha Kotiswaran and other feminist scholars who have provided robust critiques of the moral panics and harms of U.S.-driven anti-trafficking interventions. So I felt well prepared to understand the context and its politics at a macro level.

However, I would say the two big revelations during my fieldwork had to do with how anti-trafficking interventions worked on the ground. For one, I had expected NGO staff to be a lot more ideological in their approach, spewing the narrative of their U.S. donors. However, this was not the case in their everyday work. Given the physically demanding work and relatively low starting salaries, most NGO workers who did the grunt work were very young, just out of social work school, and broadly interested in gender justice issues. They did not see themselves as abolitionist feminists or even necessarily feminists at all. Their jobs involved navigating state bureaucracies and courtroom procedures and building working relationships with the local police. Though they certainly approached their encounters with the rescued women through a framework of moral and social hierarchy, their daily grind was often far removed from the moral panics around prostitution that I encountered in legislative debates, policy discussions, donor agendas, or high level “stakeholder meetings.” Spending time with NGO workers, and with the police involved in these cases, gave me a sense of their everyday labor and moral frameworks, beyond the ideological debates around prostitution.

Secondly, the existing critiques that I mentioned above have focused on the connections, collaborations and coalitions between state agencies and NGOs in the implementation of anti-trafficking campaigns. I do discuss the myriad interdependencies marking the encounters between NGOs and legal Indian law enforcement and criminal justice actors at my field sites. However, what was most intriguing to me while observing these encounters was the way the relationships between anti-trafficking NGOs and state actors, though written into the ITPA law, are often fraught, tense, and constantly negotiated. These tensions stemmed in part from the different moral frameworks through which police, prosecutors, judges, shelter staff, and NGOs perceived trafficking, prostitution, and women in the sex trade. But they also had to do with how the daily lives, labor, and responsibilities of these different actors impacted their availability and willingness to intervene. I learned that despite the longstanding role envisaged for NGOs under the ITPA, relationships between NGOs, legal actors and state agencies were a constantly negotiated and delicately maintained work in progress, reflecting the fractured governmentality of such interventions.

Such revelations are the stuff and joy of ethnographic fieldwork.