Indians experience violence at twice the rate of any other racial group in the United States. Violence against Indian women is particularly severe; in fact, Congress stated the rate of violence against Indian women has become an “epidemic.” Aside from its prevalence, violence against Indians is unique because, unlike other racial groups, the majority of crimes committed against Indians are perpetrated by non-Indians. The high rate of crimes against Indians is attributable to Indian country’s peculiar jurisdictional rules. Most notably, tribes cannot prosecute non-Indians. This limitation is not a product of the 1700s or 1800s; rather, it is a result of the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. Oliphant has been widely critiqued in legal scholarship, but it remains the law. Jurisdictional limitations are compounded by Indian country’s geographic isolation, meaning tribes rely on law enforcement agents that are often located more than 100 miles away. Not only are state and federal law enforcement far away; they have little incentive to prioritize Indian country crime. Consequently, criminals have been known to target reservations.

The chapter describes how forms of ill-treatment other than torture have been defined over the last 85 years since they were prohibited in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The core elements are described of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment are described in turn with the distinctions between these terms and the definition of torture highlighted. The distinct features of other ill-treatment under international humanitarian law are also described.

A victim is most obviously under the effective control of another where he or she has been formally deprived of liberty by the State and the perpetrator is a legal custodian. But a state of powerlessness may also arise in an extra-custodial law enforcement setting in certain circumstances. This chapter explores that dynamic, addressing the regulation of unlawful extra-custodial use of force by the police and other law enforcement officials, first as a manifestation of torture and then, in the more common alternative, as other proscribed ill-treatment.

The US-driven and NGO-mediated prosecutorial approach to address trafficking prioritizes efforts to convict the accused and foregrounds victim-witness testimony as the central piece of evidence to do so. Though training rescued women to testify against alleged traffickers is thus a key component of donor-driven NGOs’ efforts, the author’s ethnographic research revealed that this is a rare occurrence. This chapter explores the multiple and complex reasons why most rescued women don’t testify, by situating them in the broader Indian sociolegal context. In juxtaposition, it tracks the case of a trafficked woman, Sunaina Das, who testified for the prosecution in a New Delhi trial court, to also explore the constellation of factors that lead some women to testify and the challenges they face. It follows Sunaina’s encounters with the Indian criminal justice system and the support she received from both NGOs and Indian legal actors. Finally, it explores how an NGO-led training session for Indian judges impacted her case. Through these contributions, this chapter challenges prevalent assumptions in global anti-trafficking campaigns about the victimhood of Global South sex workers, about criminal justice necessarily benefiting trafficked sex workers, and about the Indian criminal justice system necessarily lacking the ability to address sex trafficking.

This multisited ethnography is not about sex work or sex trafficking, or even about anti-trafficking campaigns alone. Instead, as an anthropologist of law, NGOs, and the Indian state, the author situates the governance of prostitution in the broader Indian sociolegal and global humanitarian contexts. The book illuminates how Indian law and global anti-trafficking campaigns come together to govern prostitution, combining humanitarianism, paternalism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality. It explores the consequences of US-funded anti-trafficking campaigns operating alongside India’s existing legal framework against prostitution, and highlights the significant role NGOs play in suturing and implementing both kinds of interventions. At the same time, the book tracks how women removed from the sex trade – some of whom were trafficked and others voluntary sex workers – navigate these overlapping interventions. The title Immoral Traffic comes from India’s anti-prostitution law, which donor-driven NGOs draw upon to implement their anti-trafficking agenda. This law’s provisions and procedures to “manage” prostitution, and NGOs’ efforts to deploy and extend them, feature centrally throughout the book. Immoral Traffic takes the reader along the sequence of interventions this law prescribes and sex workers experience, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters.

Drawing upon ethnographic research and an analysis of judgments at the Special Anti-Prostitution Court in Mumbai, Chapter 4 shows how rescued women’s testimony is only one (albeit significant) factor shaping the outcomes of trials against the accused. The chapter illustrates how these trials are primarily shaped by the priorities of Indian law, its interpretation by the police and prosecutors, and the possibilities that requirements for “respectable” witnesses both in the ITPA and in Indian procedural law open up for NGOs. It reveals that anti-trafficking NGOs’ participation in the Special Court is neither entirely dependent on victim-witness testimony, nor on proving sex trafficking. Overall, the chapter shows how evidence and testimony at this Special Court is presented to prove prostitution rather than sex trafficking, and how NGOs, police, and other witnesses participate in what the author refers to as the choreography of these trials. Beyond victim-witness testimony, it examines how the testimony of other prosecution witnesses (police officers, NGO workers, and decoy customers), forms of material evidence (cash, packets of condoms and tissues), and medical reports shape ITPA cases and their outcomes at the Mumbai Special Court.

This chapter focuses on the police and other law enforcement agencies. Mapping their transformation since the 1979 Revolution, it highlights the tensions and overlapping jurisdictions between different law enforcement agencies and units, arguing that their security mission has expanded alongside their disciplinary and religious morality mission, especially since the disputed 2009 elections. To maintain order, the Islamic Republic has taken several measures, such as the expansion of law enforcement units, the establishment of several special forces for crowd control and anti-riot missions, and heavy investment in the training and equipment of these forces. The police force has also dramatically intensified its ideological programs for the indoctrination of its members and has made changes to recruitment by shifting focus toward more conservative parts of society. Despite some attempts at reform, Iran’s various police forces are not consistently subject to the rule of law, nor are they accountable to elected institutions.

Police killings of Black Americans are influenced not only by specific law enforcement situations but also by corruption – where corruption in a state is more extensive, police killings are more frequent. State-level factors may seem remote from local policing, but in fact the constitutional and political connections are strong and deep-rooted. Police killings of Black Americans also reflect contrasts in the states’ political cultures and aspects of communities’ racial composition. Median income levels and the economic gaps between Black and White populations also influence the patterns of police killings. Lobbying activities, political party competition, and police unionism contribute to overall levels of accountability. These diverse and often deep-rooted influences, many of them linked to the expectations communities have of their police and the attitudes of police toward their work and the surrounding communities, show that dealing with the problem of police killings of Black Americans will require fundamental changes of many sorts.

This chapter talks of the challenges faced by police in dealing with hunters and, more generally, describes the fragility of their relationship to citizen activists.

If the conventional wisdom brought about by Obama's success with Black voters was true then community commitment signaling should not be necessary for Black politicians as the shared physical similarities should be enough to garner support from Black voters. The findings in this chapter do not support that conventional thinking. On the contrary, I find that community commitment signals are very effective for Black man politicians when the signals they use are costly ones that rely on personal sacrifice. Black woman politicians, however, are perceived to be committed without the use of signals offering important evidence of gendered differences even within the ranks of Black politicians.

The concluding chapter reflects on the everyday lives of sex workers, police officers and public health officials in China under Xi Jinping, and considers policy implications of the book’s findings.

This chapter is about how police officers in China enforce anti-prostitution laws. These regulations outlaw the exchange of sex for money or other material goods in all of its forms, and for all individuals who engage in it. Yet in practice, police enforcement primarily targets low-tier sex workers. Of the array of possible sanctions, these women are more likely incarcerated than fined, and they are placed in institutions with a rehabilitative mission that, in practice, is not met. In addition, law enforcement officials often engage in illegal and abusive practices when arresting sex workers. Clients are not completely immune from punishment, but they are less likely to be arrested than are the women they solicit. The major exception to that pattern involves high-profile men whose actions have crossed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Their cases are taken out of the hands of street-level police officers and into the world of elite politics, with prostitution charges used to help secure their downfall.

What does Chinese law have to say about people who are involved in sex work and the places where it occurs? Prostitution control is a universal problem for which states have adopted a variety of policies to address the public order, public health, and commercial challenges that it presents. This chapter describes that range of regulatory possibilities. It then explains the official choices that China has made, through discussions of the policing, health, and taxation rules and institutions that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has adopted to regulate prostitution.