Abstract
What happens after rescue from modern slavery, the third largest organized crime in the world? The mainstream perspective suggests that people can be rescued and set free from slavery. This article challenges this assumption by arguing that rescue inflicts more violence and sends workers back to exploitative labour. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic study of 31 workers in the informal sector (and 10 civil society and state officials) in India who have being rescued (under the Bonded Labour System Abolition Act 1976), this article shows that workers have been stuck/waiting in the legal process for up to 37 years. To demonstrate the same, the article engages with the concept of ‘waiting’. The notion of waiting emerges as a poignant illustration of the profound disjunction between the visions of freedom from slavery held by states (manifested through standard operating procedures) and non-governmental organizations (with their emphasis on rescue and rehabilitation), and the lived experiences of the workers themselves, who perceive the post-rescue process as an enduring state of limbo. By bridging the realms of literature on waiting with that of human trafficking, this article contributes to the field of critical slavery studies, bonded labour and multi-sited ethnography.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Sociological Review |
| Early online date | 16 Oct 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 16 Oct 2024 |
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive engagement with the article, especially in terms of bringing out its complexity in speaking to a variety of stakeholders including NGOs. I also thank Julia O’Connell Davidson for introducing me to the scholarship on waiting and for reading various versions of this article; Nancy Harding for her mentorship in writing journal articles, and the members of the Critical Slavery Studies online group, Maayan Niezna, Simanti Dasgupta and Joel Quirk, for their constructive comments on previous versions of this article. Most importantly, I thank the field participants and the NGO workers for not only sharing their stories generously but also maintaining ongoing contact that allowed me to track their legal cases over time.Funding
The data in this article are part of a larger fieldwork project conducted in 2019 during my doctoral study. I received the Socio-Legal Studies Association fieldwork grant for this research. Follow-up fieldwork was conducted with the support of the British Sociological Association\u2019s Support Fund.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| British Sociological Association |
Keywords
- India
- bonded labour
- courts
- human trafficking
- informal labour
- modern slavery
- rescue
- waiting
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
