Recognize a Rights Framework, beyond Restrictive Rehabilitation: Marking a Month of Apex Court’s Landmark Judgement on the agency, dignity and constitutional rights of adult sex workers
napm india
Marking a Month of Apex Court’s Landmark Judgement on the agency, dignity and constitutional rights of adult sex workers
Recognize a Rights Framework, beyond Restrictive Rehabilitation
29th June, 2026: All India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA) and the All-India Workers Forum of NAPM welcome the significant judgement of the Supreme Court in Prajwala v. Union of India delivered exactly a month back on 29th May, 2026, recognizing and re-affirming the constitutional and human rights, dignity and agency of adult women in India to actively pursue work and livelihood opportunities, including sex work. For far too long, sex workers have been spoken about, legislated over, raided, ‘rescued’, detained, shamed and punished, without being recognized as political subjects with voices, choices, histories and demands of their own. This judgement is an important constitutional intervention that attempts to right a long history of wrongs, stigmatization and violence against women engaged in sex work across India.
As feminist and workers collectives, we welcome the recent judicial interventions against “compulsory rehabilitation” of women in sex work. We welcome the courts’ acknowledgement of the decades-long demand of sex workers’ organizations that consensual adult sex work should not be collapsed into or equated with trafficking. Actively involved in preventing trafficking, many sex workers’ organizations acknowledge that trafficking is a grave violation and must be addressed with seriousness and accountability. The Court’s position that the right to rehabilitation under Article 23 of the Constitution, cannot be in derogation of the right to consent to rehabilitation under Article 21, is crucial. Upholding the decisional autonomy of the adult woman, as integral to the right to live with dignity under Article 21 is a right long overdue.
Drawing from on-the-ground experience, sex workers unions and collectives adopt a realistic, practical and community-led ethical approach to challenge trafficking, which has demonstrated effectiveness. The judgement questions authorities who adopt the moralistic and puritanical abolitionist approach that seeks to stop trafficking by abolishing sex work. This approach is used to justify police violence, forced detention, moral surveillance and non-voluntary, forced and coercive “rehabilitation” of adult sex workers. As feminists, we strongly believe that rescue and rehabilitation without consent is both undemocratic and unconstitutional, while being ineffective to stop trafficking.
The judgement, rightfully, also challenges the patriarchal idea that women, especially those victimised, can only be ‘protected’ through control and incarceration. Sex workers have demonstrated their capacity to protect themselves and others including their voluntary participation in government programmes. Sex workers do not need pity or moral lessons or shaming. They need equal rights and protection from violence and discrimination. They need access to healthcare, housing, ration cards, bank accounts, education for their children, legal aid, social security and freedom from police extortion. They need the state to stop treating their lives as evidence of ‘moral failure’.
We welcome the judgement from a workers’ rights and dignity standpoint as well. Those engaged in voluntary sex work are among the most stigmatised set of workers in our society. More often than not, social stigma and obfuscatory moralizing seek to erase the worker and, therefore, any question of their rights. By giving recognition to sex workers as rights-bearing individuals, the judgement has produced a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for safeguarding their labour rights. We sincerely hope for the implementation of the court’s judgement, because a worker who cannot be arbitrarily detained and/or forcibly rehabilitated, is also a worker who can report an incident of violence to the police, and rely on public institutions to not render them invisible and unprotected. From here, we must move towards decriminalization of sex work and towards an era of fairness and equity.
As feminists, we recognize the several complexities that shape the lives and violate the rights and dignity of women and transgender persons, in multiple ways. We are aware that people enter sex work through myriad realities from poverty, rural / urban distress, caste violence, migration, debt, family abandonment, transphobia to the shrinking of survival livelihood options, making them vulnerable to being trafficked. We believe that their vulnerability does not take away their agency, just as the recognition of their agency does not mean we ignore the reality of structural coercion and oppression, which needs a systemic response.
The answer to this complexity cannot be criminalization. As sex workers’ movements in India have long argued with clarity and courage, forced rescue or carceral rehabilitation makes the lives of women and transgender persons in sex work more vulnerable. The answer lies in labour rights, social protection, housing, healthcare, community-led support systems and the meaningful participation of sex workers in all decisions affecting their lives.
It is high time the rest of the society and all social movements hear the simple and radical call of adult sex workers- ‘Nothing about us without Us’. We demand that the Union Govt, all State and UT governments, police departments, courts, and other governmental institutions implement the judgement and the Victim Protection Plan in letter and spirit. We also urge the mainstream and social media, social organizations and civil society to take forward the spirit of this judgement and hold the state accountable.
Issued by:
All India Feminist Alliance and All-India Workers Forum - NAPM
Issued by: All India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA - NAPM)
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