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BY AJAY MALLAREDDY On 6 October, five women escaped from a women’s welfare hostel in Aarilova, Visakhapatnam, after cutting through a window grille. They had reportedly been placed there after being rescued in trafficking cases. This was hardly unusual. In October 2024, six women escaped from a Swadhar Home in Pendurthi, also in Visakhapatnam. Police described five as victims in an interstate trafficking case. They had been placed in the home under court orders for counselling and rehabilitation. It was the second escape from the facility that month. In Hyderabad in February 2022, 14 women placed in an Ujjawala rescue home after cases under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act broke open a bathroom grille and scaled the compound wall. All were adults, the youngest 19. One had been there for two years and had unsuccessfully sought release. The woman running the home told The Times of India: “It looks like they did it for their freedom.” At Prajwala, one of India’s best-known anti-trafficking organisations, the protest was more explicit. In June 2022, 35 women at its rehabilitation centre near Amangal confronted security personnel, opened the gate, walked about two kilometres and protested demanding their release. They complained that criminals were outside while they, the victims, were being confined and deprived of their freedom. Police eventually returned them to the centre. Women cutting grilles, scaling walls and protesting to get out of places meant to protect them should make us examine what exactly we mean by “rescue”. There are obvious victims of trafficking. Children subjected to commercial sexual exploitation are victims. So are adults recruited through deception, threatened with violence, confined, subjected to debt bondage or otherwise forced into prostitution against their will. The coercion should be stopped and those responsible prosecuted. But trafficking and prostitution are not synonyms. An adult woman who knowingly chooses to sell sexual services is in a different position. She may need the money. She may prefer its earnings to those available in other occupations. Her alternatives may be poor. None of that means the choice ceases to be hers. Economic necessity constrains choices throughout society. People take dangerous, exhausting and unpleasant jobs because they need an income. We do not ordinarily conclude that economic pressure makes an adult incapable of deciding whether to do the work. Sex work is often treated differently. The woman becomes a “victim”. Removing her becomes a “rescue”. Preventing her from leaving becomes “rehabilitation”. Indian law gives those words physical consequences. Under Section 17 of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, a person removed or “rescued” under the Act can be placed in safe custody while a magistrate conducts an inquiry. If the magistrate concludes that she needs care and protection, Section 17(4) allows an order that she be detained in a protective home or other suitable custody for between one and three years. “Detained” is the law’s own word. Whatever benevolent label is attached to it, the physical reality is simple. If a competent adult wants to walk out and the state prevents her from doing so, she is being detained. In ordinary language, she is being imprisoned. Sunitha Krishnan, founder of Prajwala, has been one of the most prominent defenders of this custodial model. In 2020, while opposing an NHRC proposal to recognise sex workers as informal workers, Krishnan wrote to the Commission. The Indian Express reported that she said that in more than 25 years there had not been “a single instance where a woman has voluntarily gone into prostitution.” That is an extraordinarily categorical claim. The State of Rescue, a study of protective homes in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, recorded a very different account from women inside the system. Of the 32 women in protective homes who completed the study, 84 per cent said they had entered sex work voluntarily and 94 per cent said they were not being coerced into sex work at the time of the police raid. The sample is too small to tell us how common voluntary sex work is across India. What matters here is that women in this sample were overwhelmingly describing themselves as voluntary sex workers. Krishnan’s own argument provides a way to disregard precisely such testimony. In a 2019 essay defending protective homes, she explicitly distinguished trafficking victims from people who willingly chose sex work. But she argued that it could be difficult to tell the difference because trafficked women may have been indoctrinated, may have normalised their exploitation and may try hard to escape a shelter while still under the influence of traffickers. She defended what she called “safe custody” and suggested that one to two years of therapeutic intervention was a reasonable period for many survivors. That creates a serious problem. If a woman says she chose sex work, her account can be dismissed as conditioning. If she says she wants to leave the shelter, the desire to leave can itself be interpreted as evidence of continuing manipulation. Her own testimony can therefore never establish that the rescuer is wrong. The rescuer decides whether she is a victim and when she has recovered enough to exercise her freedom. A Telangana High Court case from 2022 shows where that can lead. An adult widow with a three-year-old daughter had been kept at a Prajwala rescue home since July 2021. She wanted to return to her parents and child. The prosecution argued that she had entered prostitution because she lacked a livelihood and was receiving training to support herself through other work. A lower court relied on a report from a Prajwala coordinator and refused to release her, reasoning that further rehabilitation would allow her to acquire other skills. The High Court reversed the decision. It called personal liberty “sacrosanct” and held that it would be “wholly unjustifiable” to force an adult woman to stay somewhere against her will because officials believed she required further economic training. The judgment records something revealing. The woman believed the police had arrested her and sent her to the rescue home. The High Court observed that she was not even aware that no case had been booked against her. It is easy to see why she thought she had been arrested. Police had taken her away. She was confined in an institution. She could not leave when she wanted to. She had committed no crime, yet she needed a High Court order to go home to her daughter. But even the dispute over voluntary sex work is ultimately secondary. Assume the rescuers are completely right. Assume a woman was unquestionably trafficked. She was deceived, threatened, confined and forced into prostitution. Free her from the trafficker. Arrest those responsible. Protect her from retaliation. Give her safe accommodation, healthcare, legal assistance, counselling, financial help and whatever support she needs. But she is still an adult. Being the victim of a crime does not make a person incapable of deciding what happens to her next. Trafficking is wrong because somebody has taken control of another person’s body, movement and choices. The response should be to give that control back. Rescue should restore agency, not transfer control from the trafficker to the state or to institutions acting in its name. The strongest case for involuntary custody is the risk of re-trafficking. A trafficker may threaten a woman, manipulate her family or coach her to demand release. Those dangers are real. They justify protection from the trafficker and scrutiny where there is evidence of continuing coercion. They do not justify starting from the assumption that a competent adult asking to leave does not know what she wants. The Supreme Court confronted this directly in May 2026 in Prajwala v Union of India, litigation initiated by Prajwala itself. The Court examined a system in which women trafficked against their will, women initially trafficked but later continuing in sex work voluntarily, and adults who chose sex work themselves could all pass through the same statutory machinery. It directed authorities to conduct a threshold inquiry to identify voluntary adult sex workers and spare them the full Section 17 process. More importantly, it addressed women who actually had been trafficked. Their consent, the Court held, should be the “primary and governing consideration” in decisions about long-term protective custody. The Court warned that imposing a course on an adult against her wishes could “infantilise her” and treat her as incapable of looking after herself. The Court was equally direct about what protective custody means in practice. The ITPA envisages protective homes as closed facilities. Their residents are detained and cannot move in and out freely. The Court noted that detention without consent curtails freedom of movement, disrupts family life, restricts privacy and places virtually every aspect of daily life under institutional control. There are exceptions. A magistrate may depart from a woman’s wishes if complying with them would expose her to a safety risk, or if her expressed wishes result from coercion, tutoring or undue influence. But the Court said departures from consent must be exceptional, and the magistrate must record the reasons in writing. A woman who wants safe accommodation should have it. A woman threatened by a trafficker should receive protection. Counselling, legal assistance, healthcare and help finding other work should be available. If she wants to return home, help her return home. If home is unsafe, help her build a life somewhere else. But the door should open from the inside. On 6 October, five women in Visakhapatnam cut through a window grille to leave a facility in which they had been placed. Elsewhere, women have scaled compound walls, opened gates and staged protests demanding their freedom. The response should not be stronger grilles. It should be to ask why an adult woman who has been “rescued” needs to escape at all. (Ajay Mallareddy is Director of the Centre for Liberty. Views expressed in the article are the author's alone.)

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