The US-driven and NGO-mediated prosecutorial approach to address trafficking prioritizes efforts to convict the accused and foregrounds victim-witness testimony as the central piece of evidence to do so. Though training rescued women to testify against alleged traffickers is thus a key component of donor-driven NGOs’ efforts, the author’s ethnographic research revealed that this is a rare occurrence. This chapter explores the multiple and complex reasons why most rescued women don’t testify, by situating them in the broader Indian sociolegal context. In juxtaposition, it tracks the case of a trafficked woman, Sunaina Das, who testified for the prosecution in a New Delhi trial court, to also explore the constellation of factors that lead some women to testify and the challenges they face. It follows Sunaina’s encounters with the Indian criminal justice system and the support she received from both NGOs and Indian legal actors. Finally, it explores how an NGO-led training session for Indian judges impacted her case. Through these contributions, this chapter challenges prevalent assumptions in global anti-trafficking campaigns about the victimhood of Global South sex workers, about criminal justice necessarily benefiting trafficked sex workers, and about the Indian criminal justice system necessarily lacking the ability to address sex trafficking.

This multisited ethnography is not about sex work or sex trafficking, or even about anti-trafficking campaigns alone. Instead, as an anthropologist of law, NGOs, and the Indian state, the author situates the governance of prostitution in the broader Indian sociolegal and global humanitarian contexts. The book illuminates how Indian law and global anti-trafficking campaigns come together to govern prostitution, combining humanitarianism, paternalism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality. It explores the consequences of US-funded anti-trafficking campaigns operating alongside India’s existing legal framework against prostitution, and highlights the significant role NGOs play in suturing and implementing both kinds of interventions. At the same time, the book tracks how women removed from the sex trade – some of whom were trafficked and others voluntary sex workers – navigate these overlapping interventions. The title Immoral Traffic comes from India’s anti-prostitution law, which donor-driven NGOs draw upon to implement their anti-trafficking agenda. This law’s provisions and procedures to “manage” prostitution, and NGOs’ efforts to deploy and extend them, feature centrally throughout the book. Immoral Traffic takes the reader along the sequence of interventions this law prescribes and sex workers experience, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters.

Drawing upon ethnographic research and an analysis of judgments at the Special Anti-Prostitution Court in Mumbai, Chapter 4 shows how rescued women’s testimony is only one (albeit significant) factor shaping the outcomes of trials against the accused. The chapter illustrates how these trials are primarily shaped by the priorities of Indian law, its interpretation by the police and prosecutors, and the possibilities that requirements for “respectable” witnesses both in the ITPA and in Indian procedural law open up for NGOs. It reveals that anti-trafficking NGOs’ participation in the Special Court is neither entirely dependent on victim-witness testimony, nor on proving sex trafficking. Overall, the chapter shows how evidence and testimony at this Special Court is presented to prove prostitution rather than sex trafficking, and how NGOs, police, and other witnesses participate in what the author refers to as the choreography of these trials. Beyond victim-witness testimony, it examines how the testimony of other prosecution witnesses (police officers, NGO workers, and decoy customers), forms of material evidence (cash, packets of condoms and tissues), and medical reports shape ITPA cases and their outcomes at the Mumbai Special Court.

Police killings of Black Americans are influenced not only by specific law enforcement situations but also by corruption – where corruption in a state is more extensive, police killings are more frequent. State-level factors may seem remote from local policing, but in fact the constitutional and political connections are strong and deep-rooted. Police killings of Black Americans also reflect contrasts in the states’ political cultures and aspects of communities’ racial composition. Median income levels and the economic gaps between Black and White populations also influence the patterns of police killings. Lobbying activities, political party competition, and police unionism contribute to overall levels of accountability. These diverse and often deep-rooted influences, many of them linked to the expectations communities have of their police and the attitudes of police toward their work and the surrounding communities, show that dealing with the problem of police killings of Black Americans will require fundamental changes of many sorts.

This chapter talks of the challenges faced by police in dealing with hunters and, more generally, describes the fragility of their relationship to citizen activists.

If the conventional wisdom brought about by Obama's success with Black voters was true then community commitment signaling should not be necessary for Black politicians as the shared physical similarities should be enough to garner support from Black voters. The findings in this chapter do not support that conventional thinking. On the contrary, I find that community commitment signals are very effective for Black man politicians when the signals they use are costly ones that rely on personal sacrifice. Black woman politicians, however, are perceived to be committed without the use of signals offering important evidence of gendered differences even within the ranks of Black politicians.

The concluding chapter reflects on the everyday lives of sex workers, police officers and public health officials in China under Xi Jinping, and considers policy implications of the book’s findings.

This chapter is about how police officers in China enforce anti-prostitution laws. These regulations outlaw the exchange of sex for money or other material goods in all of its forms, and for all individuals who engage in it. Yet in practice, police enforcement primarily targets low-tier sex workers. Of the array of possible sanctions, these women are more likely incarcerated than fined, and they are placed in institutions with a rehabilitative mission that, in practice, is not met. In addition, law enforcement officials often engage in illegal and abusive practices when arresting sex workers. Clients are not completely immune from punishment, but they are less likely to be arrested than are the women they solicit. The major exception to that pattern involves high-profile men whose actions have crossed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Their cases are taken out of the hands of street-level police officers and into the world of elite politics, with prostitution charges used to help secure their downfall.

What does Chinese law have to say about people who are involved in sex work and the places where it occurs? Prostitution control is a universal problem for which states have adopted a variety of policies to address the public order, public health, and commercial challenges that it presents. This chapter describes that range of regulatory possibilities. It then explains the official choices that China has made, through discussions of the policing, health, and taxation rules and institutions that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has adopted to regulate prostitution.

This chapter is about how police officers engage with sex workers when they are not enforcing anti-prostitution laws against them. By focusing their enforcement efforts on low-tier sex workers, the police help create a space for the middle tier of China’s sex industry – entertainment venues and their hostesses—to thrive. I find that law enforcement officers engage actively and in myriad ways with the sex industry when they are not focused on arresting sex workers. Some of their actions are purely extractive interactions. Yet other police behavior, while still self-serving, also benefits sex workers. Making sense of police actions in this context requires shifting our framework from exclusively viewing police as powerful figures in relation to sex workers to also viewing them as street-level bureaucrats who are accountable to the local government and the vast police bureaucracy of which they are at the forefront. This approach provides a different perspective on police officers, underscoring their weakness within China’s bureaucratic system rather than their strength in relation to the sex workers. Their vulnerability vis-à-vis the state even affects how they engage with sex workers and underscores conditions under which the job security of frontline police officers in fact depends on a cooperative local sex industry.

This chapter introduces the regulation of prostitution in China as a case study of law in everyday life. It presents China’s three tiers of sex workers, the state’s interests in the sex industry, and patterns of prostitution policy implementation. It shows how the study of prostitution and its regulation in China expands our understanding of state–society relations, and of sex work and its regulation across space and time.

Chapter 6 details the shift that occurred in Grouchy’s thought following Napoleon’s coup of 18 brumaire. Initially supportive of the new regime, she quickly became disillusioned with what she perceived as Napoleon’s authoritarian suppression of political dissent. She feared that humans, in the face of a menacing state, would seek to mask their intentions, rendering sympathy – on which her political vision was founded – ineffectual. She thus developed a newly suspicious view of governmental intrusion into the sentiments of the populace, and discarded her ideal, developed during the early days of the revolution, of the state playing a central role in fostering the political emotions of the people. These ideas were developed over the course of anonymous articles in the journal, Le Citoyen français, that she launched in 1799 with her lover, Maillia Garat, and a proposed new edition of seventeenth-century moralist La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, conceived together with her next romantic partner, Claude Fauriel. This Chapter draws on Fauriel’s unpublished manuscript, The Last Days of the Consulate, as further evidence of their joint ideas, especially their increasing suspicion of Napoleon and their distaste over his use of his secret police to spread fear and encourage duplicity.