Trafficking in human beings is the business of buying and selling or bartering human beings by duping them with false or imaginary, non-real and non-realisable promises. This business is as old as the labour market. In this market only in the case of some forms of scarce labour, where the labour has a sellers' market, the contractual obligations are by and large fulfilled by the buyers of labour. In most other cases these 'contracts' are stretched or violated in the interests of buyer (= owner of capital). Thus understood trafficking is near universal in the human civilization that entails the existence of labour markets. Some parts of these markets are those of sexual services.

To get a larger picture of trafficking in women for providing sexual services, we must first look into the barter sector of it, because it is the larger part. It is euphemistically called what it is not- namely, the market of arranged marriage, in 80% of the cases in India, that of arranged child marriage. It is not an 'arrangement' between the spouses. These marriages are thrust upon them through lies and false promises, by their masters, i.e., their parents or guardians. Here, sexual and domestic services of a life time by the women are bartered against the often false promises of a decent livelihood. The entire Indian society still condones this very large scale trafficking of women for sexual and other services.

Compared to this vast domestic barter sector, there exists a relatively small commoditized sex sector in India. Here some workers are trafficked, just as they are trafficked into agriculture, manufacturing, missing and many other sectors of the economy. The hypocritical Indian elite conflates trafficking into the sex sector with all trafficking, while enjoying the services of duped and abused wives, housemaids and servants at home. Even the concerned law of the land- the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act- condones most trafficking, save the trafficking that happens in the sex sector, as 'moral'.

In this bleak scenario, the Sex Workers of West Bengal, organized around their Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, decided to take up the battle against trafficking in their work sites. When the rest of the Indian society blissfully sleeps over the abomination of rampant forced and child marriages, the sex workers of West Bengal have taken up a fight against forced sex and child workers in the sex sector.