The Rhetoric of Revelation: Sex Trafficking and the Journalistic Exposé

In Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, their humanitarian work of 2009, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn recount their experience working as foreign correspondents in China after the Tiananmen Square protests and realizing for the first time that news media ignore the everyday realities of millions of women worldwide. From the perspective of journalists, the everyday abuses women around the world suffered were not newsworthy: "When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were routinely kidnapped and sold into brothels, we didn't even consider it news. Partly that is because we journalists tend to be good at covering events that happen in a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen to girls every day." ¹

In this account, sex trafficking—a practice also commonly referred to as modern-day slavery, sex slavery, forced prostitution, and, in earlier periods, "white slavery"—is taken to be the paradigmatic case of gender violence ignored by journalists. Yet positing sex slavery as the exemplary media blind spot is curious when one considers the history of journalism on this topic. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western news media offered extensive coverage of white slavery, making claims about the severity and ubiquity of the practice that had far-reaching and questionable legislative effects. Had Kristof and WuDunn dug deeper, they would have discovered that the advent of humanitarian campaigns against sex trafficking and the rise of investigative journalism share an intertwined history. In fact, the press played a critical role in producing now-familiar narrative conventions and rhetorical tropes commonly used to depict sex trafficking, as well as establishing methods for gathering facts and arriving at conclusions about prostitution and sex slavery.

While there may have been a dearth of news reports of sex trafficking in the decades immediately before the fall of the Soviet Union, stories of innocent women and girls held captive in prison-like brothels are not new. Rather, they have, in the last two decades, resurfaced as an object of journalistic attention. This article considers the phenomenon of the sex-trafficking expose´ at two moments, the late nineteenth century and the early twenty-first century, in order to gain some purchase on the relationship between journalistic coverage and the construction of sex trafficking as a practice viewed by many policymakers, feminists, and evangelicals as among the most urgent of global humanitarian issues.

A central premise here is that sex trafficking is not so much discovered as it is created as an object of humanitarian action, law enforcement intervention, and human rights policy. Indeed, episodes of heightened concern over trafficking have historically relied on textual assertions that involve a set of interpretations that give substance and meaning to a phenomenon not readily available to public view. To explore the cultural construction of sex slavery as an object of human rights and humanitarian intervention, this article will focus on three journalistic exposés that brought a great deal of public attention to sex trafficking: "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon," William T. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette series in 1885 on London's trade in virgins; "The Girls Next Door," Peter Landesman's 2004 New York Times Magazine piece on domestic trafficking; and Kristof's New York Times series from the same year on sex slavery in Poipet, Cambodia.

Sex Trafficking as a Cultural Construction

In the late nineteenth century, journalists, vigilance movements, and evangelical women activists established a set of images and associations—the enslaved prostitute, the prison-like brothel, the mercenary procurer, and the monstrous client—to describe the players involved in the phenomenon of white slavery. These associations were first popularized in 1880s England, but by the twentieth century's first decade they became deeply embedded in the Western imaginary such that even today the term "trafficking" (and, increasingly, "prostitution") connotes sexual enslavement, captive innocents, and mercenary villains.

Yet despite the current ubiquity of mass and activist media productions equating trafficking with sexual slavery and identifying women and girls as its primary victims, sex trafficking...