Eric Parker/Flickr. (CC BY-NC 2.0)
In July 2016, Vijaya admitted her young daughter to an orphanage in Hyderabad, India and then herself to a hospice for AIDS patients. She died a few days later. Vijaya had acquired HIV long before I first met her in 2009, but she had previously remained healthy. HIV/AIDS initiatives had equipped her to manage well. She even worked instructing others on how to avoid infection. Vijaya’s fortunes changed, however, on a night in June 2015, when Hyderabadi police forcibly extracted her from the railway station where she was soliciting customers along with dozens of other sex workers. The police selected a few of these women to prosecute as ‘traffickers’ and logged the rest as ‘victims of trafficking’. According to women there, the police made this distinction arbitrarily in order to address international demands that they not only free ‘victims’ but also locate and prosecute their ‘traffickers’.
