Moral Security: Anti-trafficking and the Humanitarian State in South India

This article argues that global panic over sex trafficking animates a mode of global governmentality that fuses together otherwise contradictory registers of care and punishment in the disciplining of women who sell sex. This mode of governmentality, termed here "moral security," foregrounds feminine sexuality as the site of greatest social risk and needful intervention. By conflating sex work with sex trafficking, moral security enables the humanitarian state to categorize all women who sell sex as victims requiring rescue, even if only from themselves. The urgency and fervor of the trafficking panic allows moral security to fuse together apparent contradictions into unwieldy amalgams: criminal victim, forced rescue, and caring punishment. To accomplish this, moral security deploys two key registers of engagement with women targeted for intervention: paternalism and bureaucratic indifference. Paternalism facilitates the possibility of harming women in the name of helping them; it is the affective glue that affixes transnational anti-trafficking metanarratives about criminality to the ambiguous realities of everyday sex work. Bureaucratic indifference further serves to deepen the harms of paternalism by disregarding and prolonging them, sometimes to the point of turning state violence into state murder. A patchwork of highly variable and often arbitrarily administered state trafficking initiatives taken in aggregate produce a state effect in which India as a whole is assessed, ranked, deplored, or petted by transnational philanthrocapitalists and other more powerful states. The state violence experienced by sex workers targeted by anti-traffickers becomes the basis for India's claim to good governance within the framework of moral security. Action "against trafficking" is translated into numbers of shelters built, victims rescued, and families reunited, which provide easily legible metrics that add evidentiary flesh to the bones of India's place in a global moral hierarchy of states.