Legislating morality

Laws on sex work remain among the most ambiguous pieces of legislation in Southasia. Each country has specific laws on the issue, with those that share a colonial past retaining penal codes framed by the British in 1860. Thus we find identical or similar statutes with regard to public decency, obscenity, morality and public health, which in turn are often used against sex workers. Common features include the penalisation of the selling or buying of services for the purpose of prostitution, and provisions such as Section 377 of both the Indian and Pakistani penal codes, which categorise homosexual acts as an offence.

Many laws limit the definition of trafficking to only those acts involving prostitution, a focus that dates back to a United Nations convention on trafficking and prostitution from 1949. The SAARC Convention on Preventing and Combating Trafficking in Women and Children for Prostitution, signed in 2002, continues this exclusive focus of prostitution as the end point of trafficking. There is no doubt that women are trafficked into sex work, but trafficked people are also forced into, for instance, domestic labour, begging and camel riding. No matter the work they are forced to do, the violence and injustice faced by those who have been trafficked, in terms of working conditions, safety and health, are rarely addressed due to the exclusive preoccupation with prostitution. In this way, the focus also becomes inexorably mired in sex and morality.