The Gordian Knot of Prostitution and Trafficking

In the past two decades, governments, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the issue of human trafficking. The "U.N. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress & Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women & Children" (the Palermo Protocol) defined human trafficking for the first time in international law in 2000. The term had been used only loosely throughout the twentieth century. The Palermo Protocol obligates its signatories (169 countries have ratified it) to take active measures to combat human trafficking in all of its forms. That same year, the United States passed the "Trafficking Victims Protection Act," and since then it has annually rated the progress the countries of the world have made towards this aim and restricted foreign assistance to those countries determined to be lacking in their efforts to comply with minimum standards.

Although most experts believe that labor trafficking occurs at a higher rate than trafficking for sexual exploitation, the latter has captured most of the attention of the media and become the focus of the bulk of legal and NGO interventions. The media routinely sensationalizes stories of women and girls enslaved for commercial sex, arousing moral outrage at the violation of notions of female innocence and purity. Americans and Europeans have been particularly shocked to discover that sex trafficking occurs in their countries and see it as a relatively new phenomenon that suddenly exploded on the world scene. Although media, governments, international, and NGOs repeat various data about the scale of the problem, we do not have accurate numbers that specialists in the field accept. As an illicit activity, sex trafficking is extremely difficult to quantify. Traffickers and exploiters seek to keep their activities hidden from authorities, while victims themselves are usually reluctant to speak. The latter typically feel shame and fear stigmatization, reprisal from their traffickers, arrest for engaging in illegal activities, and, if they are undocumented immigrants, deportation. Coming predominantly from disadvantaged or marginalized populations, they also tend to have no expectation of help and no sense of having any rights. We can neither reliably estimate how many individuals are currently trafficked for sexual exploitation, nor come to any firm conclusions about how the magnitude of the problem today compares to that of the past. What we do know is that sex trafficking did not simply appear at the end of the twentieth century but has deep roots in the past.

Rather than a recent phenomenon, the coercion of individuals by force, fraud, deception, or the abuse of power into exploitative commercial sexual arrangements is a constant of human history, modern as well as ancient. Concern and outrage about such exploitation, however, has not been a constant. Instead of finding ourselves in the midst of an unprecedented problem, we are in a moment of acute awareness of the existence, scope, and damage caused by sex trafficking. A similar moment of great concern occurred approximately 100 years ago, with numerous parallels to today. Then, as now, public and legal reactions were deeply entwined with the issue of prostitution, reflecting anxieties about female migration and sexuality, and tied to both class and ethnic tensions.

Reflecting current preoccupations of activists, law enforcement, and the media, historians have also become acutely interested in the topics of sex trafficking and prostitution. Three recent monographs discuss the alarm over so-called white slavery and the perceived increase in prostitution in England, Poland, and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These books, detailing press coverage, national debates, legislation, and...