Analysing the Supreme Courtâs judgment on sex work
For more than three decades, sex workers have told governments and courts how anti-trafficking interventions cause profound harm including forced rescues, indefinite detention in âcorrective
For more than three decades, sex workers have told governments and courts how anti-trafficking interventions cause profound harm including forced rescues, indefinite detention in âcorrective homesâ, separation from children and even threat to life. And for decades, these accounts were only acknowledged in fragments, and never in a comprehensive rights-based framework. That is what makes the Supreme Courtâs judgment of May 29, 2026, so significant. Across nearly 300 pages, the court departs from many assumptions that have long shaped anti-trafficking discourse globally. It recognises that agency and vulnerability can coexist; rejects the conflation of migration with trafficking; affirms that constitutional rights do not disappear because society disapproves of sex work; holds that consenting adult sex workers cannot forcibly be rescued; and that any intervention must begin with an inquiry into consent. Invoking Article 142, the court gives these directions legal force. But the judgment also exposes a parado it adopts arguments that have been painstakingly developed by sex workers but does not acknowledge the workers or their collectives (such as the Network of Sex Workers among others). This is not only a question of credit; it reveals how even progressive jurisprudence can reproduce a hierarchy of knowledge in which those most affected by law remain its least recognised authors. What the judgment assumes The judgment places faith in institutions that have repeatedly failed the very people it seeks to protect.
The court assumes that clearer legal standards will produce different institutional behaviour â that police officers will assess consent without prejudice, magistrates will suspend moral judgment, shelter homes will become rights-based support services, and sex workers will have access to legal aid. For many women, especially those from the Dalit and Adivasi communities, bureaucracy has never been a neutral system. Caste discrimination and economic marginalisation continue to shape everyday encounters with the state. One woman, wrongly labelled a trafficker after a raid, has spent seven years reporting every month to a police station while attending court hearings where, despite all this time, her statement has never even been recorded. âI go to court and sit outside. Then they call my name, and I go inside. But they donât ask me anything. They have not even recorded my statement yet!â The top court rightly recognises caste as one of the structural conditions that can push women into sex work. But it stops there. Caste does not simply explain entry into the profession. It also structures every institution responsible for implementing this judgment. As one worker put it: âThe state says that acche din (good days) will come. When will our acche din come? Everything is about money these days. Take any actor. They can kill but do not get arrested.
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