SEX WORK AND THE LAW: A FRAMEWORK FOR LEGAL RECOGNITION OF PROSTITUTION IN INDIA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prostitution, recognised as one of the world's oldest professions, has undergone complex legal and social transformations."Courtesans in ancient India were a regulated profession, as mentioned in texts such as the Kautilya Arthashastra and Vatsyayana, Kamasutra.However, colonial morality criminalised them, and the change in the profession was based on stigma rather than law.Today, the situation has been discriminated against in India because the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 (Act No. 104 of 1956) has given partial criminalisation to sex work, hence, maltreatment by the police, lack of healthcare services, and institutional neglect.Sex workers play significant roles in the informal economy, but are denied an identity document, franchise, ration cards, shelter, and medical care, which further marginalises their community generationally.It is also a comparative law study of two of the largest international precedents: the New Zealand Prostitution Reform Act 2003, which completely decriminalises sex work and treats it as labour, and the German regulatory approach incorporates sex work into the formal economy by requiring licensing, taxation, and compliance with health regulations.Such models can provide useful guidance in crafting an Indian framework of law that values both the liberty of individuals and the health priorities of the population.In Budhadev Karmakar v. State of West Bengal (2022), the Supreme Court upheld the right to dignity of sex workers under Article 21.Likewise, the case Canada v. Bedford (2013) condemned statutes that posed a threat to the security of sex workers.With the legal maxim Fiat justitia ruat caelum-let justice be done though the heavens fall -legal reform should focus on human dignity, the health of the population and participatory democracy, and sex work should therefore be a question concerning justice and not morality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".