Lock Up Your Daughters! Male Activists, ‘Patriotic Domesticity’ and the Fight Against Sex Trafficking in England, 1880–1912

A very un-English predicament: ‘The White Slave Traffic’ and the construction of national identity in the suffragist and socialist movements’ coverage of the 1912 Criminal Law Amendment Bill

“…Thanks to the suffragist and socialist press, attention turned away from trafficking as a problem of individuals and towards the thornier question of what (or who) was causing trafficking. The narratives popularised by Dyer (1880) regarding 'Continental debauchés' stimulating a traffic in English 'white slaves' to satiate their perverted lusts, and the NVA and JAPGW's focus on 'vicious foreign women' were marginalised in mainstream trafficking discourses (Attwood, 2015;Bartley, 2000, pp. 170-173).…”

“…Mary Ann Irwin (1996) and Jo Doezema (2010) have each analysed late nineteenth-century English 'white slavery'; rhetoric, observing the distinctions made therein between good (innocent) trafficked women, whose torment was anathema to Englishness, and bad (complicit) prostitutes, for whom no sympathy was afforded. Some scholars have engaged with the broader discourses of trafficking in England, tracing the racial material within and surrounding 'white slavery' narratives (Attwood, 2015(Attwood, , 2016Knepper, 2007;Laite, 2017b). Julia Laite (2017a), for example, pointed to the role of race and national identity in her analysis of how members of the anti-trafficking movement, governments, and international labour movement leaders in England sought to distinguish sexual labour from other types of labour for their own political ends in the early twentieth century.…”

Men at Home: Domesticities, Authority, Emotions and Work (Thirteenth–Twentieth Centuries)

“…'Patriotic domesticity' is at the centre of Rachael Attwood's contribution on English discourses on sex trafficking. 30 This problem entered popular discourse in the 1880s, when a trade in English minors to continental brothels was discovered. British girls were especially prone to be trafficked because of almost non-existent state protection.…”