Abstract
<p>This paper constitutes the eighth policy-design paper in a continuing research series on POCSO implementation, preventive criminology, and international child protection frameworks. The seven preceding papers have established, through empirical fieldwork, comparative legal analysis, criminological theory, the Displacement Hypothesis, and the Consent Architecture Deficit analysis, a three-layer architecture of child protection: (i) supply-side prevention through the IBL Model's cognitive immunity curriculum; (ii) perpetrator-side analysis through the Impulse Gap, Deterrence Deficit, and Regulatory Realism constructs; and (iii) demand-side structural regulation through the Displacement Hypothesis and its legal-theoretical complement in the Consent Architecture Deficit. The present paper performs the transition from diagnosis to prescription — from identifying what is structurally wrong to specifying what a constitutionally grounded, harm-reduction-oriented Regulated Safety Framework for adult consensual sexual services would look like in the Indian context, with the empirical validation stage identified in Section 9 as the series' next step.Drawing upon the Supreme Court of India's constitutional jurisprudence in Buddhadev Karmaskar v. State of West Bengal (2011, 2022), the comparative regulatory evidence from New Zealand, Rhode Island, the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium, the Consent Architecture Deficit's identification of the four structural misalignments in Indian consent law (Gupta, 2026d), and the constitutional architecture of Articles 14, 19, and 21, this paper proposes a Regulated Safety Framework (RSF) Model — a constitutionally grounded, institutional-design-focused policy proposal that does not advocate for the abolition of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act 1956 but for its fundamental redesign consistent with the Developmental Consent Framework's principle of Regulatory Completeness. The RSF Model is distinguished from prior policy proposals in three respects: it is grounded in the specific constitutional trajectory of Indian law rather than imported wholesale from foreign jurisdictions; it is structurally integrated with the POCSO child protection architecture through a five-layer POCSO Firewall rather than treated as an independent policy domain; and it advances child protection as its primary justification, locating sex work regulation within the larger framework of the Displacement Hypothesis's evidence base and the Consent Architecture Deficit's structural diagnosis. The paper integrates the comparative regulatory scholarship of Wagenaar and Altink (2012), Weitzer (2012), Phoenix (2009), Vanwesenbeeck (2017), and Platt et al. (2018) into the Indian constitutional context.</p>