Global Women, Colonial Ports

Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East

Liat Kozma

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781438462608, 9781438462615
• eBook ISBN: 9781438462622
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Global Women, Colonial Ports is a transnational history of state-regulated prostitution in the Middle East and North Africa between the two world wars. Beginning with international efforts to eradicate traffic in women and children, Liat Kozma examines French and British policies regarding local and foreign prostitutes in the region and shows how these policies affected and interacted with global migration routes of prostitutes and procurers. In so doing, she reveals how colonial domination mediated global mobility of people, practices, and ideas. Kozma weaves together the perspectives of colonial and local feminists with those of medical doctors, demonstrating that debates on prostitution were globalized and that transnational networks of knowledge and activism existed. She also explores the League of Nations' involvement in this social issue. As a history of the Middle East, the book joins recent scholarship on modern globalization and the integration of the region in global economic, activist, social, and religious interconnectedness.

1

THE ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON TRAFFIC IN WOMEN

The custom of the Muslims tends strongly to prevent prostitution and traffic. Women are kept in seclusion and have few opportunities of meeting men. In certain districts, infidelity on the part of women is visited with death and generally speaking, the tenets of their religion enforce strongly the protection of the chastity of women.1

No formal precautions have been taken [against traffic in women] because such measures are unnecessary in a country composed of small villages or nomads where everybody knows what the others do and where children and women are very jealously guarded.2

The starting point of this discussion is somewhat paradoxical—a denial of the trafficking phenomenon. These quotes, the first from a League of Nations report on French mandatory territories in the Levant and the second from a British report on Transjordan, state, very similarly, that traffic in women does not exist. Yet annual reports by mandatory authorities to the League of Nations committees regarding Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine include lists of women and men deported and arrested, and independent investigations by the League’s investigators also provide ample examples of brothels and of foreign and local prostitutes. As the following chapters demonstrate, moreover, both British and French authorities licensed brothels, and the French even provided field brothels for their troops. What these quotations attest to, therefore, is not the existence of traffic or its absence, but rather the kind of knowledge produced in the interwar period about traffic in women, the definitions it subscribed to, and the limits of its reach, especially in colonial contexts.

These quotes also exemplify the assumption, shared by colonial officials at the time and partially sanctioned by the League, that there was something unique about the sexuality of indigenous women in North Africa and the Levant that made them different and thus irrelevant from the perspective of international law. This chapter examines the extent to which these biased attitudes regarding the sexuality of Muslim women affected the kind of knowledge produced by mandatory powers in the Middle East and then reproduced in League of Nations’ reports. This, in turn, affected the international campaign to reduce trafficking in women and children for the purpose of prostitution. Two major players in this effort were the League of Nations’ Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children (CTW) and its successor, the Social Questions Committee.

This chapter therefore is also about the production of knowledge. Government agencies and voluntary organizations sent their reports; traveling committees explored evidence on the ground; and social workers interviewed prostitutes about their childhood. The reliability of all of these was questioned—government reports were criticized as self-serving, and the traveling committees were scrutinized for their choice of interviewees. This information-gathering project was an experiment in knowledge formation, in studying a social phenomenon on a global scale. Beyond the subject matter, at stake here was what would be considered proof of the existence of traffic.

This chapter sets the framework for the rest of the book by introducing the diplomatic and international context within which global debates on prostitution, venereal diseases, and regulation of prostitution came to be framed in the interwar period. It also explores the epistemological, conceptual, and methodological framework of these debates and how they shifted during the period under review. I demonstrate the rationale, processes, and power relations behind the production of knowledge on traffic and prostitution and thus frame my reading of these sources in the following chapters. I highlight the nearly transparent shadow of interwar colonialism, contextualizing women’s plight in the international and gendered power relations often taken for granted by contemporary reformers.

FROM “WHITE SLAVERY” TO “TRAFFIC IN WOMEN”

Beginning in the 1870s, the term “white slavery” came to denote international trafficking in women and children for prostitution. However, it was understood very differently by different groups of reformers: some defined prostitution itself as a form of white slavery, others saw regulation of prostitution as a form of enslavement, others referred to international traffic alone, while still others limited the term to abduction of virgins for an international market.3 Two international agreements, the 1904 International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic and the 1910 International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, succeeded in getting white slavery recognized as a judicial concept in international law. These, however, relied on a consensus that limited the definition of traffic to girls younger than twenty or to the use of force or fraud to procure any woman, regardless of her age, for another country. Actual cases of coerced migration were rare, but attracted most international attention. Prostitution itself continued to be seen mostly as a necessary evil, but the story of unsuspecting girls abducted for prostitution overseas played out late nineteenth-century fears of the consequences of global mobility, most notably the breakdown of families, communities, and racial boundaries. Indeed, the very term “white slavery” connoted colonial fears of miscegenation. Thus, national and colonial prestige, not merely the fate of individual women and girls, were on the line.4

The literature’s verdict on the League’s CTW is itself undecided. Recent scholarship on the CTW highlights its role as a harbinger of human rights and as the first international mechanism to incorporate a feminist agenda. Feminist abolitionists held key positions within the CTW, at least in the 1920s, and managed to promote feminist causes on an international scale. The change in terminology from “white slavery” to “traffic in women,” claims historian Katarina Leppänen, indicates an increased awareness of traffic in women in a global context and a rethinking of the racist assumptions of the earlier movement. This body of scholarship, however, takes at face value the rhetoric of the CTW’s publications. It assumes that the CTW’s investigations indeed revealed that trafficking agents bought and sold women for prostitution and that it was now equally concerned with the fate of women of all races. Barbara Metzger argues, for example, that CTW members insisted that government measures against traffic in women would not impede the personal freedom of adult women traveling alone. What she does not notice is that such concerns were raised because country reports consistently recounted deportation of prostitutes rather than the rescue of traffic victims, and travel limitations on adult women were consistently listed in such reports as antitraffic measures. Good intentions aside, the CTW’s policy recommendations and their application had little to do with the protection of women from coerced migration and coerced prostitution.5

Jean-Michel Chaumont, Paul Knepper, and Magaly Rodriguez Garcia seriously challenge the assumption that the League’s reports indeed prove the existence of traffic. A careful reading of the League’s archives, the CTW’s drafts, and unpublished reports reveal a gap between the published conclusions and the data on which they were based. These data specified migratory networks but included very little about women bought and sold. They ascribe this gap to the abolitionist agenda of the CTW’s members as well as to governments’ interest in limiting the migration of “undesirables.” Chaumont, for example, argues that the CTW’s members were falsifying their evidence to justify their crusade against licensed brothels or against prostitution in general. Their policy recommendations helped legitimize travel restrictions on, or deportation of, “undesirables,” including women traveling alone.6

My examination of the Middle East and North Africa in the CTW’s archives supports the latter analysis. In addition, as I show below, it challenges the assumption that changes in terminology eliminated the racist agenda of antitraffic activism and policy. In the Middle East and North Africa, the CTW showed little interest in nonwhite women or their traffic. Country reports authored by British or French colonial authorities listed mainly the deportation of foreign prostitutes and procurers. On-the-ground investigations, for their part, concentrated mainly on European prostitutes. The League’s investigators spoke no Arabic and showed little interest in migrant Syrian women, for example. I thus argue that the change of title, supposedly indicating a shift of emphasis, did not change international agendas. The CTW, like the League as a whole, was mostly reproducing colonial and racial power relations.

The CTW, then, was not an instrument for saving young women from international traffic, and I therefore do not analyze it as such. I rather use its products to study it for what it was—an instrument for gathering information on prostitution and the migration of women for prostitution. More than creating a mechanism to assist women who ended up as prostitutes, it generated discourse about prostitution, accumulated data, and created comprehensive databases of women in prostitution and their mobility across and within national borders. The motivation and enabling conditions for this seminal effort have their roots in the establishment of the League of Nations.

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

Founded in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, in 1920, the League of Nations was the first international body of its kind. It sought to bring together former and potential enemies and preempt armed conflicts through international arbitration. The assumption was that the trauma of World War I was powerful enough to enlist international goodwill and prevent its reoccurrence. In addition, as former empires were collapsing, the League’s mechanisms were designed to guarantee the sovereignty of states born out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and at the same time protect minorities in these newly formed and often ethnically mixed states.7 The Ottoman territories and former German colonies, on the other hand, were deemed incapable of self-government, at least for the time being, and were entrusted as mandates to France, Britain, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Africa.8

Alongside its role in the transition from a world of fallen empires to a world of nation-states, the League of Nations also had a key role in the emergence of international humanitarian norms. In the first aspect, the League’s challenge was to reconcile the ideal of independent sovereign nations with the reality of interwar colonialism and unequal global division of power. The second was supposed to be secondary to the League’s work, but came to be its most lasting legacy. The League came to concentrate international efforts to promote scientific and economic collaboration and contain increasing traffic in humans and drugs. More immediately, problems created by the Great War made hunger relief, disease control, refugees, and minorities, to name but a few examples, pressing questions on the international agenda. Even as the League was failing to reconcile or prevent armed conflicts or reconcile belligerents, its humanitarian operations continued unabated until the Second World War, motivated, at least in part, by an honest belief that both physical and social ills could be eliminated through international goodwill.9

This effective social and technical aspect of the League managed to create an epistemic, mostly European, even Eurocentric, community composed of representatives of governments and voluntary organizations as well as individual experts. The League’s committees made serious efforts to gather information, interrogate governments, conduct field trips, hammer out basic arrangements, and monitor compliance. The accumulation of knowledge was central to this endeavor. Based on the belief that the social sciences had the power to transform social realities, what the League’s mechanisms did most effectively was gather and analyze information.10

Despite its political weakness and inability to directly affect colonial rule, it created forums in which colonial powers discussed the nature and legitimacy of that form of government. Colonial power relations were reproduced in the League itself—colonized societies were analyzed without taking part in debates that would determine their future.11 The League did not provide any mechanism by which colonized or mandatory societies could communicate directly with its committees—they were simply represented by their respective mandatory powers. Nevertheless, the committees enabled anticolonial criticism to be heard in international forums and later disseminated in the world press.12 To some extent, the mandate system enabled the League’s committees to intervene in relations between the sovereign and its citizens, something it was unable to do for sovereign nation-states.13 Another such forum was the CTW.

THE FOUNDATION OF THE CTW AND ITS TRAVELING COMMITTEES

The protection of women and children against international traffic was incorporated into Article 23 of the League’s charter:

Members of the League: … c) will entrust the League with the general supervision over the execution of agreements with regard to the traffic in women and children, and the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs

Significantly, the League’s Covenant replaced the nineteenth-century terminology “white slavery” with this new one. This shift in terminology was designed to remove the racial specificity of the earlier term and thus address the plight of women of al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women
• Chapter 2 Regulating Bodies, Regulating Spaces
• Chapter 3 Mapping Mobility
• Chapter 4 The Medical Outlook on Regulation
• Chapter 5 Abolitionism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover