The Universal Cause

A history of reformers targeting sex trafficking in pursuit of other aims.

By Hallie Lieberman

MONDAY, MAY 06, 2019




Excerpts from McClure’s Magazine, November 1909, and the San Francisco Chronicle, December 14, 1886.


In 1909 McClure’s Magazine published an article exposing a dark secret in New York City. Muckraker George Kibbe Turner reported that men (many of them Jews) were luring girls and young women into the sex trade against their will as part of the so-called white slave trade:


The average life of women in this trade is not over five years, and supplies must be constantly replenished. There is something appalling in the fact that year after year the demands of American cities reach up through thousands to the tens of thousands for new young girls. The supply has come in the past and must come in the future from the girls morally broken by the cruel social pressure of poverty and lack of training. The odds have been enough against these girls in the past. Now everywhere through the great cities of the country the sharp eyes of the wise cadet are watching, hunting her out at her amusements and places of work. And back of him the most adroit minds of the politicians of the slums are standing to protect and extend with him their mutual interests.

Turner’s McClure’s article alarmed Jews who believed that anti-Semitism lay behind the focus on Jewish sex traffickers. Jewish organizations, including B’Nai B’rith, helped counter the accusations by starting their own anti-sex-trafficking crusades. Their campaigns shifted public opinion a bit, as evidenced by the writings of Clifford G. Roe, assistant state’s attorney of Cook County, Illinois. “The good Jews,” wrote Roe, know other Jews were involved in white slavery “and feel keenly the unspeakable shame of it.” He quoted an American Hebrew editorial stating, “If Jews are the chief sinners, it is appropriate that Jews should be the chief avengers of the dishonor done to their own people, and in many cases to their own women.”

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/01/jews-plan-to-fight-white-slave-trade.html

At the same time, Turner’s horrifying depiction of a sex-slave market spurred Judge Thomas O’Sullivan to begin a grand jury investigation, appointing oil magnate John D. Rockefeller to be its foreman. After months of searching, in 1910, the grand jury found there was no evidence for “an organized traffic in women for immoral purposes” in New York’s streets. The verdict should have been the end of the sex-trafficking hysteria, but more than a century later a similar lack of evidence has not prompted any slowdown among anti-trafficking campaigns or a decline in their popularity.

Since the nineteenth century, sex-trafficking reformers have come from many different groups, all with different agendas. “In contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns,” scholar Elizabeth Bernstein argued in 2010, “it is ironically secular feminists who are advocating for family values, together with a new middle-class contingent of evangelical Christians.” Both groups, says Bernstein, share “the conviction that sexuality should be kept within the confines of the romantic couple serves to cement a political alliance between ideologically disparate constituencies.”

Anti-sex-trafficking campaigns have never been proved to be effective in eliminating sex trafficking. They have clearly been successful in generating money and attention for other causes as various as women’s suffrage, labor laws, prostitution reform, religious groups, and immigration reform, however. These other agendas often crowded out the women at the center of the fight. For the most part, prostitutes’ voices have been erased from history, aside from in vice reports and a few memoirs, so the history we end up with is of people suppressing prostitution, not those engaged in it. READ MORE

The White Slave Trade: Transactions of the International Congress on the White Slave Trade, Held in London on the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of June, 1899, at the Invitation of the National Vigilance Association

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