Sex Trafficking in the Motor City: The Construction of an International Deportation Infrastructure in Detroit, USA, 1924-1944 (original) (raw)
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William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law, 2016
This article provides a unique and comprehensive analysis of the first U.S. anti-sex trafficking movement and its continuing impact on trafficking reform today. It explores the significant, yet little known campaign against the trade of young, white women, a practice called "white slavery," which emerged in the Northwoods of Wisconsin and Michigan in the 1880s. It examines the strategies developed by these late nineteenth-century activists, specifically the use of exaggeration and sensationalism, and demonstrates how trafficking reformers are still using these techniques today despite their dubious authority and effectiveness. Part I will consider why the Northwoods became a focal point for white slavery in the nineteenth-century, specifically exploring the impact of the economic, demographic, and social changes occurring in the region at that time, as well as the role of the burgeoning mass media. It will also examine the escalating nature of the Northwoods white slavery allegations and the public outcry that they caused. Next, it will study the strategies developed by anti-trafficking activists, specifically the use of exaggeration and sensationalism to garner support. Finally, it will investigate Wisconsin's and Michigan's responses to white slavery and consider why this nineteenth-century campaign failed to generate the level of national law reform achieved by later anti-trafficking movements. Part II will attempt to glean some truth about the existence and extent of prostitution and sex trafficking in the Northwoods in the nineteenth-century, specifically acknowledging that many historians now believe that white slavery was a myth. It will conclude with a demonstration of how the exaggeration and sensationalism strategies developed by nineteenth-century anti-trafficking activists are still being used today and an inquiry into whether or not such techniques encourage effective law reform.
Sex Trafficking Victims and Offenders in the United States
Journal of Law Policy and Globalization, 2014
This project analyzed data previously collected from the University of Michigan Human Trafficking Law Project and the United States Department of Justice in order to identify the trends and relationships among several variables pertaining to sex trafficking victims and offenders in the United States. Recommendations include suggestions on the micro, mezzo, and macro levels to prevent sex trafficking and provide treatment to survivors and offenders. Both findings from the study and the literature review indicate that sex trafficking is an emerging global crisis, in which millions of women and children are deceived and coerced into sexual slavery. Although State and federal policies have been enacted to combat sex trafficking in the United States, globalization, a culture of tolerance toward sexually aggressive behavior, the high demand for prostitution, and government corruption and/or inaction have continued to allow sex trafficking to exist as one of the most profitable crimes for offenders. Chapter 1 THE PROBLEM Background of the Problem The idea of trafficking people for profit emerged from the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Before 1865, approximately 10 million African men, women, and children were forced to cross the Atlantic Ocean to settle in North or South America, with approximately 645,000 slaves brought to the United States (Shelley, 2010). Upon arrival in the New World, they were sold and forced into slavery, where they were often beaten, dehumanized, and not compensated for their work in plantations. During the 19 th and 20 th centuries, the terms "white slavery" and the "yellow slave trade" were coined to describe transnational sex trafficking from Europe and Asia to the United States (Doezema, 2000). Women from these continents were offered opportunities to work and live in the United States, and were deceived into signing contracts with trafficking recruiters stating that they would work to pay back smuggling fees. Once in the United States, women were never able to pay back the money owed,and were forced to have sex with paying male
“Sex Trafficking and the Visibilities of the Nineteenth-Century North American Slave Trade in Present-Day Context” argues that sex trafficking in the early nineteenth century has striking parallels to current practices. Traffickers operating as firms took captives, isolated, and moved them, enforced dependence and imposed narratives that obligated captives to participate in selling themselves as subjects of sexual exploitation. Yet most captives so trafficked were invisible to reformers. Even a legal trade operated in a segmented and shadowy market. Trafficking firms were organized and articulated, some operating over long distances. Traffickers surveyed here were business insiders who built and managed human supply chains. This paper focuses on cases of young female captives, analyzing their trajectories and contexts, along with legacies, using criminology, psychology, and sociology, framed in terms of present-day abolitionism. It focuses on sex trafficking as opposed to sexual abuse during trafficking, glimpsing captives’ responses such as traumatic bonding and counter-strategies including occupational mobility. Historical analysis usually construes sex trafficking in this context using the framework of “the antebellum slave market” within a historiography of African American history culminating in civil war and emancipation. But sex trafficking is a process linking (mostly) female subjects from a range of backgrounds, ethnicities, linguistic groups, and geographic regions. Viewing sex trafficking as a continuing practice gets at structural violence linking African American history and American slavery to the commoditization of captives across time and space.
Trafficking, the Anti-Slavery Project and the Making of the Modern Criminal Law
2 complemented by legislation at the national level as countries seek to make domestic law consistent with their international obligations. In England and Wales there was legislation criminalising trafficking for the purposes of prostitution in 2002, 2003 and 2009, and for purposes of labour exploitation in 2004. Much of this was then brought together in the Modern Slavery Act 2015. In Scotland, the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act was passed in 2015 containing separate offences of trafficking and slavery. This burst of legislative activity has brought about a broadening in the scope of the crime of trafficking and the way that the crime has been conceptualised. This has shifted from an initial concern with prostitution, which had been the focus of anti-trafficking laws for much of the past century, to include other forms of people trafficking, child trafficking, forced labour and even trafficking for the purposes of surrogacy or organ harvesting. Crucially, this shift in focus has increasingly linked trafficking to the idea of modern slavery, understood broadly as the forced exploitation and restrictions on freedom of the individual.
Trafficking Histories: Women’s Migration and Sexual Labor in the Early Twentieth Century
Deportate, esuli, profughe. Rivista telematica di studi sulla memoria femminile , 2019
This article takes a historical approach to what we now call sex trafficking, exploring its roots in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates on “white slavery” and “the traffic in women”. Using digitized genealogical records along with French consular records from the United States, Argentina, and Uruguay — three important receiver nations of immigrants at this time — it examines how alleged cases of trafficking might be reframed as gendered migration histories. In particular, it shows how discussions surrounding the deportation and repatriation of foreign women involved in prostitution unearthed a number of enduring questions about sex work and trafficking: How do we distinguish between forced and free migrations? Is victimhood a necessary condition for receiving social assistance? Can humanitarian interventions, in the name of rescue and rehabilitation, enable restrictive or even punitive measures? In sum, a critical reading of historical documents points to women’s lives as laborers and migrants more than as trafficking victims.
Human Trafficking in the United States. Part I. State of the Knowledge
This article, the first of a two-part series, introduces the topic human trafficking in the United States. Based on the literature review, the author delineates definitions of "human trafficking," the extent and types of human trafficking in the United States, characteristics of trafficked victims and perpetrators, the human trafficking data reporting system, and examples of cases in the United States and its territories. The goal is to provide an introduction to this topic for library staff to use in their research and instruction services. Part II, to follow, is a survey of United States government web resources on human trafficking in the United States for publications and data.