Towards the end of May 2026, a two-bench judge of the Supreme Court issued the Prajwala v. Union of India judgment to delineate the guidelines for a ‘Victim Protection Plan.’ The nearly 300-page judgement traces the history and context that goes back to the 2004 petition filed by Prajwala, an antitrafficking organisation based in Hyderabad. Prajwala had drawn the court’s attention to victims of trafficking being treated as criminals and to the urgent need to centre the victim. The Immoral Traffic Prevention Act in India (ITPA), 1956, and The Suppression of Immoral Traffic in Women and Girls (Amendment) Act, 1986, are the key legislations in India. Two points are worth noting here. First, they are based on a criminal justice framework – while it attempts to identify and punish the trafficker, the victim often gets ensnared in this punitive regime. Second, though regularly misunderstood, even intentionally misconstrued, the ITPA does not criminalise prostitution per se. However, clauses such as “keeps or manages, or acts or assists in the keeping or management of, a brothel,” “being the tenant, lessee, occupier or person in charge of any premises” and “(p)unishment for living on the earnings of prostitution,” often end up criminalising the victim as well. There have been past court adjudications on anti-trafficking and victim protection, to which the Government of India has responded multifariously. For instance, in 2015, the Supreme Court ordered the creation of an Organised Crime Investigation Unit (OCIA) and an Inter-Ministerial Committee led by the Ministry of Women and Child Development. In response, the Lok Sabha introduced and passed the Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection, and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2018, which did not reach the Rajya Sabha. Similarly, in a 2021 Bill, rather than creating the OCIA, GoI inducted anti-trafficking under the surveillance of the National Investigative Agency (NIA). Finally, with the reincarnation of the Indian Penal Code as the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), the government deemed it superfluous to introduce separate anti-trafficking laws. Taken together, Prajwala contended that for 26 years, GoI had been non-compliant in adopting a Victim Protection Plan. What the victim protection plan gets rightThe Victim Protection Plan outlined by the court is commendable in several ways. It not only centres the victim, but also does so within the human rights framework rather than the usual criminal justice system. More importantly, the court, disrupts the routine conflation of trafficking with sex work to uphold the dignity of sex workers and erases simplistic binaries between coercion and consent. To this effect, the judgment introduces a “threshold inquiry”: through a close exchange with the apprehended person, the magistrate will determine whether they are indeed trafficked and want to be rehabilitated or are choosing sex work as a means of livelihood. In other words, the magistrate will uphold the subject position of the ‘victim’ to establish and support their agency. Thus, rehabilitation cannot be perfunctorily imposed upon someone following a raid-and-rescue operation in the name of protection.The sex work movementWhile the judgement is laudable, it is missing a rather critical element: the sex work movement across India. The movement has been particularly attentive to the issue of trafficking and has shown a firm commitment to preventing minors and unwilling adults from joining the profession. Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee’s (DMSC) Self-Regulatory Board (SRB) is an indubitable example of such an endeavour. The SRB was formed in 1997, soon after the formation of DMSC in 1995. In 1992, the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health in Kolkata recruited female sex workers as peer educators for the STD/HIV Intervention Project. The goal was to stem the spread of the deadly virus among sex workers, who were identified as a High Risk Group (HRG). However, in the absence of sex work labour rights, the intervention project – mainly enforcing condom use with male customers– was destined to fail. At this critical juncture, sex workers collectivised to form DMSC, advocating for two interrelated issues. First, HIV/AIDS was not simply a threat to public health, but also a threat to the lives and livelihood of sex workers. Second, sex work is distinct from trafficking and workers are committed to preventing minors and unwilling adults from joining.It was in this latter context that the SRB was formed, based on a human rights framework that centred individual dignity and liberty. The SRB is composed of five sex workers and five other members, ranging from the MLA/MP, local counsellor, medical professionals to academics. Its process involves identifying a new entrant to the red-light district, verifying age through a bone scan test, sending minors home if the family can be contacted (or otherwise placing them with the Child Welfare Committee) and determining if an adult was trafficked or arrived by their own volition. The process is time consuming, arduous and complex, since, as the court notes as well, trafficking on the ground eschews “single fixed conditions but rather spans a broad continuum of possibilities.” Therefore, in the recent judgment, to exclude their voice is not simply an oversight but perpetuates the stereotype of the sex worker as unreliable narrator of their own lived experiences.Court’s recognition of the sex work movement in the pastThe court has, previously, recognised the contribution of the sex work movement. Of particular significance is the Budhadev Karmaskar v State of West Bengal, a landmark case where the court evoked Article 21 of the constitution to uphold the dignity and rights of sex workers. The panel that the Supreme Court convened following the case was tasked, among other matters, with recommending an anti-trafficking policy framework. It proposed the Multi Stakeholder Regulatory Board, a modified version DMSC’s SRB model that assuredly retained sex workers as vital stakeholders in anti-trafficking initiatives. The Supreme Court is yet to review the panel’s recommendations.Aligning principlesAll the key concepts discussed in the judgement – consent, agency, heterogeneity, subjectivity – are present in the SRB as a reliable model in introducing effective anti-trafficking work. Furthermore, for the “threshold inquiry,” the lynchpin of the Victim Protection Plan, to be meaningfully implemented, the agency of both the victim as well as the sex worker will have to be recognised as two separate realms of inquiry. The ‘Guidelines on the Victim Protection Plan’ are based on nine fundamental principles: Primacy of Human Rights and Dignity; Non-criminalisation; Informed Consent; Non-stigmatisation and Non-Discrimination; Safety and Protection; Privacy and Confidentiality; Right to Information; Individualised Care and Protection and Best Interest of the Victim. Most of these principles overlap with those of the SRB, which in turn reflect those of the sex work movement in India itself. Thus, at this important historical juncture when we hear the sex workers speak for themselves rather than being spoken for, it is absolutely necessary to listen to them as bearers of the lived experiences of anti-trafficking work. A missed opportunityThe Parjwala judgement thus missed a critical opportunity to disseminate the grassroots work that initiatives like the SRB have been undertaking for close to three decades now. Equally, the recommendations of the Budhadev Karmaskar panel, too, could have been considered, since they would spontaneously embrace the voice of sex workers. If the mission is to centre ‘victims’ while also acknowledging sex work, the complex work of the SRBs sheds light not only on how to prevent trafficking, but also on the entrenched structural issues that underscore it. Anti-trafficking as a global initiative and an intervention has come a long way, particularly with a quarter-century now passed since the United Nation’s Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially the Palermo Protocol was adopted in 2000. It is now apparent that the original criminal justice framework is inadequate, even counter-productive, in meaningfully centring the victim and that there is a larger push to shift to a human rights approach. We owe this to decades-long grassroots sex work movements such as DMSC and others. Sex workers have time and again demonstrated two issues consistently: the urgency of separating agentic sex work from trafficking and the importance of attending to the actual socio-economic contexts that enable trafficking, rather than mobilising the idea of a perfunctory victim. The Prajwala judgement is truly an endeavour that impressively breaks away from the Palermo Protocol to help us redesign anti-trafficking methods. However, without the sex worker movement as part of this redesign, we may find ourselves back where we began.Simanti Dasgupta is Professor of Anthropology, University of Dayton, USA. Bishakha Laskar is Secretary, Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, India.