The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women by Stephanie A. Limoncelli (review)

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), adopted in 1979 by the United Nations General Assembly, contains a short sentence alluding to sex trafficking. Nations that are party to CEDAW (the United States is not among them) "agree to take appropriate measures against all forms of traffic in women and exploitation of women."¹ The document is vague about what "appropriate measures" might be and to whom they might be applied. Do they include women who have willingly entered into contracts for sexual labor? Are all steps a state might take to address trafficking equally just?

Sociologist Stephanie Limoncelli argues that these ambiguities are rooted in the history of European empire. The rise of global markets and the race for colonies had produced, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, a burst of international humanitarian reform movements. These efforts, spearheaded by an educated bourgeoisie, were aimed at ameliorating the effects of capitalism and ending practices of coerced labor.

As nineteenth-century humanitarians in the United States and Europe declared victory over Atlantic chattel slavery, they turned to the nationalist project of protecting white women and children from exploitative labor that was often articulated as a baser and more criminal form of servitude. Although The Politics of Trafficking does address age of consent, Limoncelli's main focus is the failure of feminist efforts to end the sexual traffic in adult women between nation-states, between metropolis and colony, and within colonies. "Initially conceived of as a global humanitarian effort to protect women from sexual exploitation," the antitrafficking movement instead expanded social control over women and advanced the project of separating desirable from undesirable migrants (2). Women's sexual labor, Limoncelli argues persuasively, cannot be fully extracted from the project of empire or from the racial and sexual ideologies that empire consolidated.

Limoncelli foregrounds the work of the International Abolitionist Federation and the International Bureau for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic and their effect on the Netherlands, France, and Italy from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Both groups fought the traffic in white women and girls, yet their efforts also restricted women's independence and mobility, promoted state brothels, and pushed colonized women into sex work. The study is punctuated by three international conventions intended to end the forced movement of women across borders for the purposes of prostitution, two in 1904 and 1910 and one established by the League of Nations in 1921.

It is no accident that the League took on the task of protecting women. European border creation and protection were important outcomes of World War I. The deployment of colonial troops across Europe and elsewhere also threatened to reverse imperial gender, racial, and sexual relations. As Limoncelli points out, the League's political failures have obscured the policy precedents it set for international sex-trafficking laws by drawing on humanitarian ideologies. Most prominently, it banned the employment of "foreign" women in state-owned brothels and promoted the repatriation of trafficked women to their countries of origin. Limoncelli's discussion of the League highlights the questions that she pursues throughout the book: what was the object of rescue, women or the nation? The answer is both, but the interests of women were necessarily subordinated to patriarchal nationalism.

The language of humanitarian reform linked the uncontrolled movement of women across borders, venereal disease, and the potential blurring of racial boundaries within colonies to the specter of national decline. And yet the military project of nation and empire inevitably created these possibilities. The International Bureau, in particular, assumed that soldiers' and colonists' sexual needs would have to be met and that encouraging the immigration of white women to places where they might mingle and reproduce with indigenous men was unacceptable. Within Europe, sexual mingling drew national scrutiny during the...