By: Aashna Goel
This week, Delhi’s prisons finally ended an archaic policy: segregating incarcerated sex workers from other female inmates. The change follows a Supreme Court directive to remove discriminatory rules from prison manuals. This ruling builds on its 2022 ruling that sex workers are entitled to full constitutional dignity under Article 21.
It is a meaningful reform, but it only changes how the state treats sex workers after they are locked up. It does not change the statute that put them there in the first place. The Immoral Traffic (Prevention)Act, 1956 (ITPA) criminalises solicitation, brothels, and shared earnings. The state has decided to humanise custody rather than question why consenting adults were taken into custody in the first place.
What the Collectives Demand
In Kolkata, the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) has run self-regulatory boards since the 1990s. Their panels include sex workers themselves, tasked with screening new entrants for coercion and identifying minors, without routing every case through the police. In Maharashtra, Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP), supported by SANGRAM, runs a comparable self-regulatory system. The All-India Network of Sex Workers has for years demanded to decriminalise the trade itself and keep trafficking a serious and separately prosecuted crime. They also demand to let sex workers organise the way any other informal-sector workforce does.
This framework is not an abstract theory imported from outside. It is an operational model developed over decades by the communities living under the daily violence of current law. The framework also mirrors legislative reforms that have succeeded elsewhere. Gillian Abel conducted a comprehensive evaluation of New Zealand’s decade under the Prostitution Reform Act 2003. She found that the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective (NZPC) was the decisive catalyst behind the law. Reform did not emerge from moral hand-wringing by external commentators. Instead, it succeeded because organised workers framed safety, access to health care, and bodily autonomy as fundamental rights.
How Criminalising Endangers the Worker
The ITPA does not explicitly criminalise the individual act of selling sex, but it outlaws solicitation, brothel-keeping, and living off the earnings of prostitution. So while the trade is legal on paper, in reality every mechanism required to practice it safely is a crime.
This affects a worker’s daily physical safety. A fixed, known premise lets workers screen clients, check in with peers, and maintain emergency response systems. Criminalising brothels and shared spaces forces the trade underground. It strips workers of visibility, isolates them in unregulated environments, and prevents colleagues or managers from intervening during violent encounters.
This dynamic is not unique to India. The Lancet established in its landmark series on HIV and sex work that human rights violations occur across all policy models, but they are “most egregious in climates of criminalisation.”Outlawing the perimeter around sex work treats occupational safety as a criminal conspiracy.
New Zealand provides another empirical counterweight. Its Prostitution Reform Act 2003 decriminalised the trade entirely while maintaining strict criminal penalties for coercion and the involvement of minors. The review led by Gillian Abel demonstrated immediate, measurable gains in occupational safety:
● Power to Refuse Clients: The proportion of brothel-based workers who successfully refused a client rose from 47% before reform to 68% after decriminalisation.
● Rights Literacy: Within a decade of reform, over 90% of sex workers reported an explicit awareness of their legal and employment rights.
● Police as Safety Allies: On the street, police patrols shifted from being perceived as a threat of entrapment to an encouraging presence that protects workers’ safety and monitors client vehicle registrations.
● Occupational Health and Safer Sex Negotiation: The law banned brothels from advertising workers as medically “clean,” combating to foster a broader culture of safe sex.
Why Conflating Sex Work with Trafficking Backfires
No welfare argument works if it ignores trafficking. Carole Pateman argues that poverty compromises consent, making commercial sex inherently non-voluntary. But acknowledging economic coercion demands better safety nets, living wages, and viable exit options, not criminalising the infrastructure sex workers rely on for physical safety.
Markets around sex work have historically been used to coerce women, and any serious reform must confront that reality directly. Yet this history is precisely why the law must separate trafficking from voluntary adult sex work.
When police focus on raiding visible brothels, state resources are spent disrupting an established trade rather than tracing the hidden networks that actually traffic people.
India’s Supreme Court acknowledged this distinction in Budhadev Karmaskar (2022), ruling that consenting adult sex workers are entitled to dignity and equal protection under Article 21. Delhi’s recent decision to abolish segregated prison cells for sex workers is a direct, welcome outcome of that ruling. A Supreme Court direction, however, is not a statutory amendment. ITPA’s soliciting and brothel-keeping provisions remain on the books, untouched by the ruling. Court orders cannot substitute for repealing the provisions that put them there.
What a welfare-centred law would look like
New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act 2003 (PRA) is worth treating as a template. Its purpose clause
(Section 3) draws a boundary that Indian policy debates struggle to articulate: decriminalisation is not moral endorsement. The Act exists explicitly to “decriminalize prostitution (while not endorsing or morally sanctioning prostitution or its use” and to construct an enforceable framework around safety, health, and human dignity.
The Act backs that purpose with enforceable mechanisms:
● Contracts are valid: Agreements for commercial sexual services are not void on public-policy grounds. This brings sex workers into ordinary contract law rather than leaving every dispute unenforceable.
● Occupational health and safety law applies: Sex workers are treated as “at work” under New Zealand’s Health and Safety at Work Act while providing services. This puts them under the same protections as any other worker, rather than a separate, lesser category.
● Coercion is punished more harshly: Inducing or compelling someone into sex work, or into handing over their earnings, through threats, blackmail, or withholding drugs carries up to fourteen years’ imprisonment. Gillian Abel documents New Zealand courts using the Act’s protections to convict a police officer who abused his authority to coerce sex from a worker, and to jail a client for nine years for a violent rape.
● Minors are protected absolutely, and separately: Anyone assisting, contracting with, or profiting from a person under eighteen in the trade faces up to seven years’ imprisonment, enforced independently of the adult framework.
A law built around sex workers’ welfare, rather than around suppressing the trade, would translate this template into the Indian context. It would:
● Decriminalise the Operating Perimeter: Repeal ITPA provisions on solicitation and brothel-keeping, establishing lawful status for operational premises and civil contracts.
● Institutionalise Collectives: Grant formal legal standing to community-run mechanisms like DMSC’s boards, mirroring the PRA’s small owner-operated model.
● Guarantee Labour & Social Protections: Extend basic occupational health norms, institutional banking access, and the right to refuse clients, while legally protecting social security benefits for individuals exiting the trade.
● Target Coercion, Not Consensual Work: Maintain severe, standalone criminal penalties for trafficking and child exploitation, shifting investigative assets from local brothels to cross-border coercive networks.
New Zealand proved this is buildable, not utopian. Dignity delayed at the level of statute is dignity denied at the level of the street.
About the Author:
Aashna Goel is a social work student and public policy enthusiast currently pursuing her Master’s in Social Work at the Department of Social Work, University of Delhi. Her academic and professional interests are rooted in a commitment to understanding and addressing complex social issues through research, policy, and practice.