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Dr. Kimberly Walters

Associate Professor, Department of Global Studies

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On May 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of India handed down a landmark 298-page judgment in Prajwala v. Union of India (2026 INSC 609). Written by Justice J.B. Pardiwala, the ruling fundamentally restructured the country's legal and institutional approach to sex work and anti-trafficking law, establishing that voluntary adult sex workers cannot be forcibly "rescued" or detained against their will, and that consent must govern any intervention affecting them. At two junctures in that judgment, the Court cited the peer-reviewed scholarship of Dr. Kimberly Walters of California State University, Long Beach.

It is a rare distinction for academic work to be named in any nation's highest court. At paragraph 358, the Court drew on Dr. Walters's 2020 article "Moral Security: Anti-Trafficking and the Humanitarian State in South India" (Anthropological Quarterly) to document that India's protective homes have been widely criticized for mirroring penal custodial institutions. At footnote 121, it cited her 2016 article "Humanitarian Trafficking: The Violence of Rescue and the (Mis)calculation of Rehabilitation" (Economic and Political Weekly) to establish that rehabilitation efforts fail when they ignore the economic realities of women's lives—a finding the Court used to ground its new, binding Victim Protection Plan. The work of Dr. Vibhuti Ramachandran (UC Irvine), a longtime interlocutor of Dr. Walters, was cited alongside hers, underscoring how independent, rigorous ethnography accumulates into legal consequence.

Behind those two footnotes lies years of fieldwork. Between June 2018 and February 2019, a research team traveled to fifteen protective homes across Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to ask a question the rescue system itself had declined to ask: who is actually inside? Interviewing 156 women and fifteen shelter heads in private, away from staff, the team found that the women detained under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act were overwhelmingly not the trafficking victims the law imagined. They were adults—mothers, wives, primary earners—most of whom had entered sex work without coercion, and who were nonetheless confined, processed through disorganized courts, and held under a funding structure that rewarded their continued detention. Those findings became the 2021 WINS report The State of Rescue and its accompanying white paper, the documents linked below. The throughline from that fieldwork to the Supreme Court's reasoning is direct: forced rescue harms women, rehabilitation fails when it disregards their economic agency, and treating sex workers as perpetual wards rather than citizens is constitutionally untenable.

There is a deeper irony worth naming. The case was brought by Prajwala, the very anti-trafficking organization whose practices Dr. Walters spent a decade documenting recording the testimonies of women who attempted escape, rioted, and protested their confinement. The Court, ruling on a petition that sought stronger rescue measures, arrived instead at many of the conclusions her ethnography had reached. This research continues in her forthcoming book, Rescued from Rights: Sex Worker Lives and the Politics of Anti-Trafficking in South India (University of Illinois Press).

None of it would exist without the people who made the fieldwork possible. The research team extends its deepest gratitude to the shelter inmates who consented to be interviewed, sharing their experiences with candor during a time of considerable personal hardship, and to the shelter heads who trusted the team with frank assessments of the shortcomings of anti-trafficking law, policy, and practice during the period of data collection. The team gratefully acknowledges the financial support of Dr. John Schneider and the University of Chicago's Committee on South Asia Studies, who kindly funded the fieldwork and transcription costs. Fieldwork and interviews were conducted by Meera Raghavendra (WINS), P. Devi (WINS), S. Radha Vaishnavi (WINS), K. Ramu (WINS), Archana Rao (University of Hyderabad), and Kimberly Walters (ºÚÁÏÍø). Translation and transcription of interview audio-recordings were conducted by Arshata Khan. Coding and data analysis were conducted by Vaishalee Chaudhary and Hawk McFadzen.