- Dr Prabha Kotiswaran
- Research Leave scheme
We are in the midst of a ‘global sex panic’: prostitution and human trafficking are pressing and high profile concerns for national governments and international agencies, reflected in frequent coverage in the international media.
In response to sanctions threatened by the US government as part of domestic anti-trafficking legislation, the Indian government has been debating a proposal to criminalise the customers of sex workers – a move to which Indian sex workers, who have organised politically in the last ten to fifteen years, are firmly resistant.
Published in 2009, AHRC funded Dr Prabha Kotiswaran’s critical reader of Indian writings on sex work will target a broad audience in order to 
inform public debate concerning the prospective legal shift, and her monograph Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor and Other Stories of the Lumpen Proletariat: Rethinking the Regulation of Sex Work will engage with the standpoints on sex work which dominate contemporary debate.
In the monograph Kotiswaran disputes ‘the unwavering faith of both abolitionists and sex work advocates in the power of the criminal law’. These two opposing arguments are that criminalisation will eradicate sex markets, and conversely that decriminalisation will empower sex workers. But what would the abolition of sex work mean for the women for whom it currently provides a living? And if sex work is decriminalised, how would sex workers be protected from the harms of the industry?
Following interviews with workers in two different sex markets in India, 
Kotiswaran seeks to draw attention to the complexities of sex workers’ reality by conceptualising sex work as work – like other industries, subject to market structure, social norms and private legal rules as well as criminal law. Rather than looking at sex work in terms of generalised harm or sex worker agency, Kotiswaran considers the reality – who is discriminated against within the labour market? Who are the stakeholders in sex industries? Who is earning how much? Kotiswaran argues that greater acknowledgment and analysis of the complexities of sex work would avoid unintended negative consequences of sweeping legal reform.