Laws on sex work remain among the most ambiguous pieces of legislation in Southasia. Each country has specific laws on the issue, with those that share a colonial past retaining penal codes framed by the British in 1860. Thus we find identical or similar statutes with regard to public decency, obscenity, morality and public health, which in turn are often used against sex workers. Common features include the penalisation of the selling or buying of services for the purpose of prostitution, and provisions such as Section 377 of both the Indian and Pakistani penal codes, which categorise homosexual acts as an offence.
Many laws limit the definition of trafficking to only those acts involving prostitution, a focus that dates back to a United Nations convention on trafficking and prostitution from 1949. The SAARC Convention on Preventing and Combating Trafficking in Women and Children for Prostitution, signed in 2002, continues this exclusive focus of prostitution as the end point of trafficking. There is no doubt that women are trafficked into sex work, but trafficked people are also forced into, for instance, domestic labour, begging and camel riding. No matter the work they are forced to do, the violence and injustice faced by those who have been trafficked, in terms of working conditions, safety and health, are rarely addressed due to the exclusive preoccupation with prostitution. In this way, the focus also becomes inexorably mired in sex and morality.
Even in societies with a large number of oppressed categories of people, sex workers continue to come almost at the bottom in terms of society's view of them. Morality has been the dominant prism through which sex work has been viewed, and the impact of this is visible in laws that continue to regulate the practice. Sex work, the term being increasingly used in part to highlight the respectability of work itself, finds no place in any law in the region today. Instead, prostitute and prostitution are the vocabulary of law, terms that have gained centuries' worth of negative connotations.
It is interesting that, for the most part in Southasia, sex work/prostitution specifically is not declared illegal. Still, a number of activities linked with this work are criminalised, including solicitation, running a brothel and living off the earnings of prostitution (including, at times, for children living off their mother's earnings). Punishment for clients – a step vehemently opposed by sex workers as an attack on their livelihood, and a step that would drive prostitution underground and lead to more hazardous working conditions – is now proposed to be introduced in the Indian law. The laws seem to be basically sympathetic, viewing the sex worker as a victim (albeit an oft-criticised view) and attempting to target traffickers and those forcing individuals into sex work.