The Politics of Trafficking

The First International Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women

Stephanie Limoncelli

• Éditeur: Stanford University Press
• Année: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804774178
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Sciences sociales
• Sous-sujet: Études relatives au genre

Sex trafficking is not a recent phenomenon. Over 100 years ago, the first international traffic in women for prostitution emerged, prompting a worldwide effort to combat it. The Politics of Trafficking provides a unique look at the history of that first anti-trafficking movement, illuminating the role gender, sexuality, and national interests play in international politics.

Initially conceived as a global humanitarian effort to protect women from sexual exploitation, the movement's feminist-inspired vision failed to achieve its universal goal and gradually gave way to nationalist concerns over "undesirable" migrants and state control over women themselves. Addressing an issue that is still of great concern today, this book sheds light on the ability of international non-governmental organizations to challenge state power, the motivations for state involvement in humanitarian issues pertaining to women, and the importance of gender and sexuality to state officials engaged in nation building.

1

Introduction

[T]here is a regular trade in young girls who are bought and sold, imported and exported, to and from the ports and cities of Europe.... It will naturally occur to remark that such a traffic involves slavery.... The business is an international trade, kept up very much by the movement of girls from one country to another, and in a very large number of cases the movement [does not have] the nature of emigration, or free voluntary movement of adults, but of export, that is, movement of persons under stress of fear or fraud, often minors incapable of consent.

—P. Bunting

We want to destroy this traffic. Well, a traffic consists of three parts; first, there is the supply; second, there are the traffickers; and third, there must be a demand.... [E]verything that can be done . . . to improve women’s position . . . will cut off the supply.... [S]trike at the supply, strike at the traffickers, but strike also at the demand for the victims.

—Henry J. Wilson

THE TRAFFIC IN WOMEN AND GIRLS FOR PROSTITUTION has captured the attention of academics, activists, politicians, and reporters around the world, spurring an energetic movement to help those involved in the international sex trade. As the introductory quotes suggest, women and girls may be moved across borders into situations of coercive prostitution tantamount to slavery. What may surprise those who think of trafficking as a recent phenomenon, however, is that the introductory quotes are actually from reformers at an international anti-trafficking congress in 1899.¹

It was well over a century ago, amid increasing globalization and the rise of nation-building and imperialism, that the emergence of traffic in women and girls for prostitution alarmed reformers and state officials in European and other countries throughout the world.² They formed anti-trafficking committees within countries and worked to incorporate anti-trafficking activities first into the League of Nations and then into the United Nations. They also developed a variety of international anti-trafficking accords from 1904 through 1949, before the movement began to lose momentum. Trafficking was actually the first women’s issue taken up in international accords, well before other issues that were advocated during the same period, including suffrage, education, and married women’s citizenship.³

This book traces the construction and diffusion of the first anti-trafficking movement from its beginnings in Great Britain to key European countries, including the Netherlands, France, and Italy, where local anti-trafficking movements varied in their agendas and in their successes. Initially conceived of as a global humanitarian effort to protect women from sexual exploitation, the movement’s international feminist-inspired vision failed to achieve its universal goal. Instead, in both international settings and in local areas, it gradually gave way to nationalist concerns about protecting states from certain groups of “undesirable” migrants and led to increased social control of women.

Why did the movement lose its original vision and turn against the very women it sought to protect? The core theme and argument of this book is that the movement was limited by the central role of women’s sexual labor in both nation/state- and empire-building. State officials sought to defend and preserve their right to maintain and regulate prostitution in metropolitan and colonial areas in support of militaries and migrant laborers, and as a means of maintaining ethnic hierarchies. They were able to do so largely because the international voluntary associations who initiated the first anti-trafficking movement were divided in their approaches to prostitution, in their views about the proper role of state involvement in sexual relations, and in their imperial and national biases.

Using archival and secondary historical sources, the first part of the book examines the overall development of the movement as it was promoted by two key international voluntary associations that competed to define the issue of trafficking in both international settings, such as at the League of Nations, and local areas. One of the associations, composed of emerging feminist groups, challenged state sovereignty in matters of prostitution; the other, which was organized by purity reformers, sought to reinforce that sovereignty. This broad level of analysis from a global vantage point allows us to see the workings of international governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and the often contradictory outcomes of humanitarian efforts in international governance. The anti-trafficking movement ended up reinforcing rather than challenging state power as state officials selectively used reforms as mechanisms to realize their own interests in maintaining and controlling women’s mobility and sexual labor.

This process was mediated to some degree by the interactions of voluntary associations and state officials in particular locales, and by the importance of women’s sexual labor in empire-building. In the second part of the book I highlight the efforts of the international voluntary associations in specific countries where their relative influence, along with the perceived importance of prostitution to nation-building and imperial projects, led to differences between specific anti-trafficking projects in the Netherlands, France, and Italy. Only the Netherlands applied anti-trafficking measures throughout its territories and addressed the traffic in non-European women. Officials in France, in contrast, sought to maintain the state’s right to permit immigrant women in state-regulated prostitution and refused to apply anti-trafficking measures in colonial areas. In Italy, state officials used the issue of trafficking as a proxy for controlling migration as part of Fascist population policy, and tried unsuccessfully to import European, but not Italian, women for prostitution in colonial areas.

As early examples from an international humanitarian movement, these first anti-trafficking efforts need to be considered as part of global politics, replete with power struggles and contradictions of their own. To understand the dynamics and outcomes of the movement, then, we must critically examine not only the international voluntary associations that founded and fostered the movement, but also the actions of involved state officials as well as the relations between the different actors. This examination also requires that we consider the movement in its historical context, as part of a period characterized by economic globalization; by the consolidation of Western European nation-states, their increasing infrastructural development, and the creation of the international state system; by the rise of women’s activism as they struggled to define new positions within nation-states; by ongoing but embattled colonialism; and by the rise of ethnonationalism.

Gender, International Politics, and Women’s Sexuality

Women’s bodies and sexuality are central to the making of nation-states and empires.⁴ Women’s potential as childbearers and mothers, as well as workers and settlers, positions them in unique relation to state-building projects and as markers of ethnonational boundaries; they are integral to the physical and cultural reproduction of the nation-state and empire.⁵ This material and symbolic importance provides a clue as to why trafficking for prostitution became the focus of the first international conventions pertaining to women, and why the problem was addressed by state officials before other issues of importance to feminist social reformers, including women’s suffrage. Trafficking was catapulted into the international realm not only because feminists and purity reformers lobbied for change; it was taken up by state officials precisely because of their concern with the regulation of women’s sexuality.

Gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity, in many intertwined configurations, have been important in the discursive delineation of imperial and national boundaries.⁶ In constructing the nation, women are evoked as mothers, as symbols of “the national hearth and home,” and as wives and daughters who are the bearers of masculine honor.⁷ The sexuality of women in any of these roles can become central preoccupations of state officials, who have often sought to ensure women’s sexual respectability, that is, their availability to men of their own nation and not of others. Sexual relationships that transgress this boundary have been understood as endangering the very bounds of the nation, whether the women involved had voluntary or involuntary sexual relations with ethnic or national “others” or, in the case of this study, were involved in prostitution across racial, ethnic, or national boundaries. Unbounded female sexual activities have been seen as dangerous and unpatriotic, a threat to the strength of the nation and the honor of men.⁸

Such preoccupation with women’s bodies and sexual relationships is strongly tied to the masculinity of nationalism and imperialism.⁹ Nation-state and imperial projects have been masculine endeavors and have both constructed and reflected male interests, assumptions, and anxieties.¹⁰ It is not just that men have historically dominated state institutions, but also that nationalism, as a source of identity and action, has been intertwined with a certain type of masculinity, one that has dominated other, alternative forms.¹¹ If women are the mothers of empire and nation, then men have been cast as their leaders and protectors, ensuring their defense. Thus militarization has been central to the masculinization of nationalism and imperialism.¹²

Racial and ethnic dynamics have also been at work in the protection of national and imperial boundaries, and they have often been sexualized.¹³ As Ann Stoler has argued, sexual contracts—whether through cohabitation, marriage, or prostitution—have shaped the boundaries of European membership and the interior frontiers of the colonial state.¹⁴ Colonial “politics of exclusion” constructed who was subject or citizen, using sex, race, and class as central markers. ¹⁵ Not only was colonial authority bolstered in this manner, but so too was European sexuality, which was constituted partly by sexual arrangements in particular colonial formations.¹⁶ Non-Europeans in colonial areas took part in this process as well as in their own constructions of sexuality, a point to which we will return in the case studies in Chapters Five through Seven.

Although women’s sexual relations have been of central symbolic importance in constructing the boundaries of nation and empire, this book also reminds us about the need to understand and analyze women’s sexual labor as an important part of modern state-building. The physical reproduction of the nation-state or empire, after all, depends on women’s reproductive labor, and the health of the state has long been linked to the reproduction of its inhabitants.¹⁷ More than that, women’s paid and unpaid sexual relations with men have been important for the business of nation and empire. Colonization schemes have been organized around sexual arrangements.¹⁸ In many parts of the world, single men or married men apart from their families were the officers, administrators, laborers, and military men on imperial projects.¹⁹ Given the masculinity of nation and empire, the sexual and domestic needs of such men were presumed, and authorities did their best to regulate those needs using women’s sexual labor.

Their efforts involved particular patterns of organizing women’s sexual labor in plantation and settler colonies, and in militarized areas. The trajectory of colonialism was also important. For example, in the early stages of colonialism, concubinage was often the preferred arrangement for the use of women’s sexual labor; later, prostitution was often put into place, especially in areas with large numbers of migrant laborers or military men. Militarization, in particular, led state officials to attempt to control and regulate women’s sexual relations in colonial and metropolitan areas through the use of prostitution.²⁰ Still later, European women were encouraged to emigrate from the metropole in order to settle and “civilize” colonial areas as wives to European men.²¹

Women’s bodies and sexuality, then, have long been put to use in service of the nation-state and empire. The need to specify which women should be paired with different groups of men—what Philippa Levine calls the “taxonomic urge” to control who “bed and wed”—was an ongoing project for state officials and for businesses operating in European imperial states and in colonial areas.²² It occurred directly in nation-state and imperial projects as population and its control became central concerns of state officials and the state’s infrastructure and administration increasingly took on the task of policing and regulating subjects and citizens. Yet just as the politics of women’s sexuality led state officials to attempt to channel and regulate women in colonial and metropolitan settings, so too it shaped the international movement to combat trafficking. In its central preoccupation with the protection of women from sexual exploitation, the movement ended up replicating not only national and imperial boundaries, but also gendered ones.

The First International Anti-Trafficking Movement

International humanitarianism was a newly emerging phenomenon in the 1800s. It arose out of Christian missionary and charitable work, the antislavery movement, and the efforts of Henri Dunant, founder of the International Red Cross, who helped to develop the Geneva Convention of 1864. International humanitarian networks were a product of emerging globalization and imperialism, and a challenge to them, even as they constructed empire and nation.²³ These networks began to form international nongovernmental organizations specifically to alleviate the suffering of “distant others” around the world.²⁴ Using common tactics such as petition drives and protests to achieve change, they began to target the state as a locus of change.²⁵

Voluntary associations concerned about the exploitation of women in prostitution were among the first organizations to develop and internationalize, and they took some terminology and tactics directly from the earlier international movement to abolish slavery. Beginning in 1875, reformers in Great Britain founded what would eventually become the liberal feminist International Abolitionist Federation, which worked to abolish the state regulation of prostitution around the world. Later, in 1899, purity reformers founded the International Bureau for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, which eventually changed the la...