Trafficked White Slaves and Misleading Marriages in the Campaigns Against Sex Trafficking, 1885-1927 (original) (raw)
Related papers
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 In sum, a critical reading of historical documents points to women’s lives as laborers and migrants more than as trafficking victims.
“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.
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.
Slavery Versus Marronage as an Analytic Lens on “Trafficking”
2021
Dominant discourse on "trafficking" and "modern slavery" has been heavily criticised by scholars who argue that its framing of the problem as a criminal justice issue both overlooks the political and structural roots of vulnerability to violence, exploitation and abuse (such as criminalisation and stigmatisation of sex workers, immigration regimes, austerity, neoliberal economic reform) and encourages the criminalisation and/or immobilisation of marginalised groups, including sex workers, irregular migrants, child labourers, child migrants and runaway youth. This chapter explores how histories of fugitivity and marronage-the process of extricating oneself from slavery-might provide a more helpful starting point from which to theorise and research the contemporary experience (both positive and negative) of migrants who appear as vulnerable to "trafficking" and "modern slavery" in mainstream discourse.
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
2013
This article analyzes stories and images of sex trafficking in current mainstream US public discourses, including government publications, NGO materials, news media, and popular films. Noting the similarities and differences among these discourses, the first part demonstrates that they often frame sex trafficking using a rescue narrative that reiterates traditional beliefs and values regarding gender, sexuality, and nationality, relying heavily on patriarchal and orientalist tropes. Reflecting this rescue narrative, mainstream public policies focus on criminal justice solutions to trafficking. The second part suggests alternative frameworks that empower rather than rescue trafficked people. The article argues that the dominant criminal justice approach to trafficking—the state rescuing victims and prosecuting traffickers—will not alone end the problem of sex trafficking, but that public policies must address the structural conditions that create populations vulnerable to trafficking...
The sex trafficking of women has received attention by the U.S. social work profession as a contemporary human-rights abuse. However, trafficking is not an emergent issue but is historically situated within the profession. Sex trafficking is inextricably linked with the origins of professional social work, with Jane Addams playing a critical role in the Progressive Era fight against sexual slavery. This has impacted the contemporary understanding of sex trafficking by social workers and has had practice implications. This article examines historical and contemporary parallels, policies, and perspectives on the sex trafficking of women in the United States. Keywords: White slavery, sex slavery, sex trafficking, human trafficking, prostitution, sex work, Progressive Era
Trafficking with abolitionism: An examination of anti-slavery discourses
What do discourses about prisons, trafficking and “prostitution” have in common? This paper analyses the ideological framework of social movements with respect to the rhetorical deployment of abolitionism. Critical to all of these movements is the concept of abolishing slavery. After tracing “the new abolitionism” of trafficking and prostitution back to the 19th Century Anglo American temperance movement, this paper will address the following: How are these social movements impacted by considerations of (social) class, religious fervor, gender, sexuality, citizenship, race, and ethnicity? Who is speaking for whom and why does it matter, politically and ethically? In what ways are today’s opponents of “prostitution” reproducing yesterday’s slogans of “white slavery”? It is argued that there are some fundamental differences between contemporary anti-prison movements and the anti-sex industry movement. Prisoners’ rights activists focus on the causes of mass incarceration and explore which demands best lead to overall decarceration; penal critics demand excarceration and a complete transformation of the penal system. Those who condemn “prostitution” rely heavily on the prosecution of “pimps” and “johns” with the goal of freeing the girls and women from “sexual slavery.” Finally, the paper will explain in detail why it is misplaced to label the movement against the sex industry as abolitionist rather than, say, prohibitionist.