‘The girl in red flowers stilettos’ - Sexualised extortion in North India

This paper investigates acts of extortion ethnographically. 

The anthropology of violence and rackets has paid scant attention to the morphology of threats and the ways interpersonal intimidation intertwines with economic and political forms of threats. Drawing on ethnographic insights from North India, this paper examines the way (criminal) intimidation is normalized, consented to, and embedded in everyday life. 

More specifically it explores cases where the threat is crafted by misusing laws originally put in place to protect vulnerable groups, such as the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013 which amended the law on rape in 2013, and The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO). The story about the girl in red stilettos is one of the five cases of sex extortion I am currently writing about. 

This material offers an ethnographic entry point to study the social life of extortion in kinship and gender spheres and opens new ways to explore the dynamics of sex and power on the ground. It is argued that the anthropological perspective – with its focus on the everyday conceptions and practices of relatedness, exchange, and predation as well as verbal, body, and ritualistic forms of communication – offers an exceptionally useful point of departure to start advancing an ethnographic theory of racket sociality within and beyond ‘traditional’ organized crime networks.

About the speaker 

Lucia Michelutti is Professor of Anthropology at University College London, author of The Vernacularisation of Democracy. Caste, Religion and Politics in North India (2008) and co-author of Mafia Raj: The Rule of Bosses in South Asia (2018) and Criminal Political Economies in South Asia (2019). 

In 2020 her project, titled ’Anthropologies of Extortion, has been awarded an ERC-Advance Grant (2021-2026) to study extortion practices cross-culturally.

Image by Abuzar Xheikh via Unsplash