Rescued from Rights: Sex Workers and the Politics of Antitrafficking in India

In South India, selling sex offers women a viable livelihood when motherhood, widowhood, abandonment, or failed relationships leave few options. But it costs them respectability. Torn between the need to earn and the need to be seen as good, some independent sex workers call themselves victims of trafficking even as they reject the programs that claim to rescue them.

Kimberly Walters reveals that in the name of rescue, sex workers are seized from their livelihoods, detained in rehabilitation homes, cut off from their families, and returned to the poverty that sex work had eased. The antitrafficking apparatus, Walters argues, fuses humanitarian care with disciplinary coercion and deepens the precarity it promises to end. In this context, women’s trafficking stories are addressed less to rescuers than to their own communities—a plea for the moral belonging their work denies them.

Nuanced and illuminating, Rescued from Rights draws on years of fieldwork to reveal what sex workers want that neither rescue nor rights can give them.