Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917 by Gretchen Soderlund (review)

Gretchen Soderlund’s book, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, examines public discourse about sex trafficking through the lens of media studies. It seeks to understand how the coverage of sex scandals shaped journalism in America during the Progressive Era at the dawn of mass media. This historical focus on the development of modern media practices uses the reporting of scandals in popular newspapers, magazines, and advocacy periodicals to understand broader changes taking place in the press during a period of social change. Coverage of sex scandals, Soderlund argues, emerged as “one of the premier battlegrounds” for debates over what constituted truth and objectivity in journalism (xiii). More than a parallel phenomenon to changes occurring in the media between 1885 and 1917, scandals in the press over sex trafficking or white slavery helped propel the shift from sensationalism to the notion of journalistic objectivity.

One of the key contributions of this book is its interrogation of how social activism shaped journalistic practice. Public discourse on sex trafficking reveals the complex relationship between the anti-vice movement and the press. The focus is necessarily transatlantic, with W. T. Stead’s coverage of white slavery in Britain treated as a foundational moment in the transformation of campaigns against white slavery into what Soderlund calls, much in the voice of Stead himself, a “newspaper crusade” (2). Chapter 2 is dedicated to Stead’s contributions to the debates over white slavery and his sensationalist coverage of child prostitution in “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” an 1885 exposé published in the Pall Mall Gazette. Here the social purity movement and the media worked together to produce a particular narrative of vice and female suffering by employing new narrative techniques. This included the interview and the exposé, which relied on media stunts such as Stead’s purchasing of a young girl on the streets of London to make a point about the pervasiveness of the practice.

Soderlund’s underlying interest in the production of “truth” rather than the content of debates over white slavery means that she focuses primarily on the context surrounding the coverage of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sex scandals. Sensationalism is read as a means to an end, a way of drawing attention to culturally relevant phenomena that can be used by a variety of social actors for different purposes (17). “Positive sensationalism,” when read as such, does not neatly contrast with “objectivity” in journalistic practice but rather emerges as a practice where truth claims are negotiated and contested (22).

News coverage of sex trafficking, when understood in this framework, had a transformative effect on the media by creating new ways of telling stories about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Stead’s role in the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” scandal secured his status as a father of this new journalistic practice. Clearly, the controversy over white slavery constitutes part of the history of New Journalism, though this familiar story is one that Soderlund does not spend much time exploring. The focus on the sex scandal as a narrative that transforms modern media practice leaves little room for considering the primacy of other narratives about social reform and social reform movements, including temperance and women’s rights campaigns, which emerged at the time and used similar storytelling techniques for similar ends. This raises the question of how public discourse surrounding sex scandals intersected with other forces at work in reform journalism that helped shape the New Journalism in both Great Britain and the United States.

Chapter 3 offers a partial answer to this question by turning to the United States. Stead’s work had an undeniable effect on both news gathering practices and the anti-vice campaign across the Atlantic. In America, women moral reformers adapted Stead’s narrative techniques to serve the needs of their own campaigns. But what about other reform campaigns? The anti-vice movement was...