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The proposed Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill of 2018 (the bill) is driven by anti-trafficking activists’ desires to shape a comprehensive legislation on human trafficking – a laudable goal, given that existing anti-trafficking law and procedures generate an array of harms. We describe these harms below by elaborating on efforts to address sex trafficking under the Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act, 1986 (ITPA). We argue that the bill serves to extend rather than redesign the present, flawed anti-trafficking infrastructure. It will create additional complications through vagueness and overlap. Consequently, we recommend that the bill be jettisoned and that the ills of existing legislation (especially the ITPA) be remedied rather than ignored.
Flawed foundations: Ills of the ITPA
Despite its nomenclature, the ITPA is primarily an anti-prostitution rather than anti-trafficking law. It centres on housing those ‘recovered’ from prostitution in protective homes, thereby removing them rather than curbing exploitative practices within the sex industry. Yet, many experience this very form of intervention as an extended mode of trafficking. Women and girls report that at each point of encounter with the ITPA apparatus, they are met with a strong and sometimes violent disregard for their rights and needs.
