FROM WHITE SLAVERY TO SEX TRAFFICKING

It was interesting, way back when I first started researching “white slavery” to read Emma Goldman’s essays about prostitution. But I wasn’t really getting anywhere on the subject of the current issue. The only other “book” I found was a mid-1960’s dissertation that I made a Xerox copy of—before copy companies were forced by intellectual property lawsuits to stop Xeroxing books. I read and studied it (and kept it in my file cabinet for fifteen years before finally deciding to throw it away). It told me a lot from a few girls’ experiences of being kidnapped and forced into degrading situations and some of the cruel means sex traffickers use to control women. Some of the stories still stay with me after all these years.

Then I finally came across the book I was looking for. Kathleen Barry’s 1984 book Female Sexual Slavery was the first book I know of that actually addressed the disparity of the term “white slavery”. She writes, “The term ‘white slavery’ was formally used at the 1902 Paris conference where representatives of several governments met to draft an international instrument for the suppression of the white slave traffic (Les Traités des Blanches.) While the term was initially meant to distinguish the practice from nineteenth-century black slavery, it has immediate appeal to racists who could and did conclude that the efforts were against an international traffic in white women. So in addition to being sweet, innocent, and young, victims were also coming to b e seen only as white, despite the evidence that the traffic included black, brown, and yellow women. The term eventually embodied all the sexist, classist, and racist bigotry that was ultimately incorporated within the movement dominated by religious morality. Because of the confusion and misuse resulting from the term, the International Conference of 1921 recommended that the term white slavery b e dropped and replaced with “Traffic in Women and Children.” This was subsequently the language of the League of Nations and the United Nations studies and reports. Nevertheless, coming from the bigotry and originally brought it into common use, the term is still retained today.

It was Kathleen Barry who taught me that the term “white slavery” had been abandoned for the more encompassing terms “trafficking in women and children,” and “sexual slavery.”

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