ABSTRACT
In May 2011, Nicholas Kristof, the award-winning New York Times journalist, accompanied members from a US abolitionist organization, the International Justice Mission, on an undercover raid in Sonagachi, Kolkata’s largest red-light area (Kristof 2011a, 2011b) where he claimed to have rescued fi ve girls from a lifetime of rape. Meanwhile, Gloria Steinham at the invitation of Apne Aap Worldwide, an Indian anti-traffi cking NGO, recently called on Indian policy-makers to criminalize customers of sex workers and not sex workers themselves, offering this as a thirdway policy between criminalization and legalization. Thus, we fi nd the embattled fi gure of the enslaved Indian sex worker making its way into the international imaginary against the backdrop of what some scholars label a global sex panic (Weitzer 2006; Brennan 2008: 49) animated by anti-traffi cking initiatives that explicitly see to abolish sex markets around the world (Bernstein 2007; Brennan 2008: 49-50). In a countervailing mode, sex workers’ groups across India and indeed in many parts of the developing world have mobilized to call for sex workers’ labor to be recognized as work even while exposing the violence of the postcolonial state.
