The Enduring Legacy of British Colonialism on Sexual Exploitation in India

This paper explores how colonialism still influences the laws and their application regarding sex trafficking and slave trade in India, tracing its developments from the British era to its present-day implications in the current anti-trafficking legislation. In colonial India, prostitution was predominantly perceived as an organised trade requiring regulation driven by concerns for the British soldiers’ well-being. The Cantonment Act of 1864 and the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868 exemplified this approach, treating sex workers as moral transgressors and subjecting them to intrusive medical examinations. The colonial influence can be discerned in India’s present anti-trafficking legislation, viz: The Immoral Traffic Prevention Act of 1956, where the legislators conflate prostitution with sex trafficking by criminalizing solicitation without distinguishing voluntary sex workers from trafficking victims, leading to the criminalization of the very individuals the law aims to protect and misidentifying voluntary sex workers as needing rehabilitation. The current anti-trafficking discourse in India oversimplifies sex work by categorizing it as either exploitation or choice, while neglecting the complex realities of labour exploitation, poverty, and gender inequality in a developing world. This stance is corroborated by research that revealed a tendency among criminal justice stakeholders to underutilise specific provisions of the 1956 Act against traffickers while disproportionately prosecuting prostitutes. We contend that this skewed emphasis on criminalisation and ambiguity regarding victims’ rights is directly linked to the colonial state’s perceptions of prostitution. Though in tune with the international efforts to eradicate modern day slavery, the 1956 Act is an imprint of a criminalizing legacy left by British colonialism in India. This paper concludes by advocating for re-evaluating the Indian anti-trafficking law and suggests a radical shift rooted in human rights principles, in which victims are at the centre of all legal and policy considerations.