Trafficking Histories: Women’s Migration and Sexual Labor in the Early Twentieth Century (original) (raw)

Movement of women: Trafficking in the interwar era

Womens Studies International Forum, 2007

This article fills a gap in the histories describing the struggle to end trafficking and prostitution. The two main focal points of previous research are most often the movements against state regulated prostitution dated to the late 19th century and the fight against so called “white slavery”, on the one hand, and the modern trafficking and prostitution that emerged due to the concentration of large troops of armed forces during the Vietnam War in the 1960s, on the other hand. The period in between is seldom recognised as a time of great women's/feminist activity on the issue of prostitution and traffic in women.The aim of the article is to show how the transition of the issue of prostitution developed from being mainly of national (even nationalistic) interest to becoming a matter of international concern. A shift in terminology opened for an internationalisation of the fight against trafficking.

Coercion and Choice The "Traffic in Women" between France and Argentina in the Early Twentieth Century

French Historical Studies, 2019

This article employs police investigations of the "traffic in women" between France and Argentina in the first three decades of the twentieth century to highlight the multiple narratives in play when contemporaries talked about trafficking and relayed their experiences of it. While the dominant narrative of "white slavery" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized coercion, sexual exploitation, and victimization, many young working-class women described the journey to Argentina in terms of perceived opportunity, whether for money, travel, or freedom. This is not to downplay the social and economic vulnerability of these women and the precarious lives they led in French and Argentine cities. Instead, the article emphasizes the inadequacy of many existing frameworks for discussing sex trafficking, and prostitution more generally, as they rely too heavily on a stark division between coercion and choice.

Sex Trafficking and the Visibilities of the Nineteenth-Century North American Slave Trade in Present-Day Context

“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.

Stolen lives or lack of rights? Gender, migration and trafficking

TRAVAIL, capital et société, 2006

Même si la définition mondialement acceptée de la traite des personnes inclut la migration et l'exploitation dans tout secteur économique, la recherche et les initiatives concernant la traite des adultes se sont surtout cristallisées sur les migrantes travailleuses du sexe. Cette étroite polarisation sur les femmes et le travail du sexe a permis le développement d'un cadre de référence centré sur les femmes, tout en privant d'attention nécessaire les questions liées au genre dans la traite des personnes. Cet article identifie le manque d'analyse liée au genre dans la traite des personnes comme une lacune de la recherche actuelle et ébauche des solutions correctives. L'auteure soutient d'abord que la traite des personnes doit être considérée comme partie intégrante de la migration vers l'emploi. L'analyse aborde ensuite les deux éléments essentiels de la traite des personnes, le mouvement et l'exploitation. À l'aide d'exemples latino-américains, l'auteure identifie les processus sociaux-économiques qui causent la migration liée au genre et ceux qui rendent les migrants plus vulnérables à la traite des personnes. Des études de cas servent à démontrer que cesser de traiter en victime les personnes touchées par la traite pour reconnaître la propre agence des migrants est un premier pas vers l'assurance que leurs droits de personnes et de travailleurs seront protégés.

Making progress: ‘sex trafficking’, sex work, temporality and im mobility

Sociological Research Online, 2024

Anti-trafficking discourse is built upon and reproduces a series of either/or conceptual binaries (voluntary/forced, consensual/coerced, agent/victim) which obscure the unseen, structural factors that shape the fates of men, women, and children under the economic, social, and political relations of global capitalism, as well as their experience as workers in given countries, sectors, and workplaces. Some sex worker rights activists and scholars have contested its application to prostitution by emphasising that ‘not all sex workers are trafficked’. However, this position also privileges the question of whether an individual voluntarily chose or was coerced by a third party into a given form of work. Drawing on biographical interview data with women in sex work in Brazil that shows how past, present, and hopes for the future are woven together in their sex-work trajectories, this article adds to the literature that critiques anti-trafficking discourse through a focus on temporality. It argues that by following the trajectories of sex working women’s lives over time, it is possible to better grasp both the protean nature of sex work, and the impossibility of fixing people’s participation in it as either forced or free.

Brides, Maids, and Prostitutes: Reflections on the Study of 'Trafficked' Women

Portal: journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 2006

My sincere thanks to Devleena Ghosh and Barbara Leigh for inviting me, Joseph Alter and Kevin Ming for their comments, S. Carole Vance for inspiring me to think about trafficking, and to the migrant women whose experiences have deeply influenced my view of the world. 2 There are a growing number of recent studies that criticize popular notions of trafficking, that do not blur boundaries or that do so in productive ways (e.g., Cheng 2002; and contributors to Piper & Roces 2003). Constable Brides, Maids and Prostitutes of a common phenomenon, one that can most simply be glossed as 'trafficked women.' My second and related concern has been-especially in the case of correspondence marriages-that some authors have focused on, or reproduced in their own work, simplistic stereotypes or an imagined fantasy of 'mail order brides' with relatively little attention paid to the variations in the circumstances, forms of introduction, and actual experiences of couples who have met through correspondence and eventually married. Therefore, before considering productive comparisons, it is important to carefully consider the variations within each 'category' of migrant woman, and the limitations of defining them as a category in the first place. My aim here is to reconsider some of the scholarly and popular depictions of so-called 'mail order brides' as 'trafficked' women; to question what I consider the warranted and unwarranted blurs that subtly or explicitly enter some of the scholarly and activist literature on 'mail order brides'; and to highlight heterogeneity in the experiences, circumstances, and expressions of agency of women who meet men through correspondence. The literature on sex workers has influenced my thinking about correspondence marriage, not because brides and sex workers are fundamentally alike, but because they are both subjects of the wider discourse on trafficking, women's agency, and women's victimization. I aim to highlight the weaknesses of a trafficking framework from an ethnographic perspective, and point to some of the ways that theoretical issues raised in the sex worker literature might apply to the study of correspondence marriages. 3 Despite important theoretical insights that can come from a combined discussion of sex workers, domestic workers, and foreign brides, and despite many similarly structured patterns of inequality, I urge caution. Women's emigration to rich countries Because migrant sex workers, maids, and correspondence brides often (but not always) 3 This essay draws from research I began in 1998 among women and men who met through correspondence and from research conducted among Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong in the early 1990s. Constable Brides, Maids and Prostitutes