This article compares current concerns about "trafficking in women" with turn of the century discourses about "white slavery." It traces the emergence of narratives on "white slavery" and their re-emergence in the moral panics and boundary crises of contemporary discourses on "trafficking in women." Drawing on historical analysis and contemporary representations of sex worker migration, the paper argues that the narratives of innocent, virginal victims purveyed in the "trafficking in women" discourse are a modern version of the myth of "white slavery." These narratives, the article argues, reflect persisting anxieties about female sexuality and women's autonomy. Racialised representations of the migrant "Other" as helpless, child-like, victims strips sex workers of their agency. The article argues that while the myth of "trafficking in women"/"white slavery" is ostensibly about protecting women, the underlying moral concern is with the control of "loose women." Through the denial of migrant sex workers' agency, these discourses serve to reinforce notions of female dependence and purity that serve to further marginalise sex workers and undermine their human rights.European women for prostitution in South America, Africa or "the Orient" by nonwestern men or other subalterns. Yet, though the geographical direction of the "traffic" has seemingly switched, much of the rhetoric accompanying the campaigns sounds remarkably similar. Then as now, the paradigmatic image is that of a young and naive innocent lured or deceived by evil traffickers into a life of sordid horror from which escape is nearly impossible.The mythical nature of this paradigm of the "white slave" has been demonstrated by historians. Similarly, recent research indicates that today's stereotypical "trafficking victim" bears as little resemblance to women migrating for work in the sex industry as did her historical counterpart, the "white slave." The majority of "trafficking victims" are aware that the jobs offered them are in the sex industry, but are lied to about the conditions they will work under. Yet policies to eradicate "trafficking" continue to be based on the notion of the "innocent," unwilling victim, and often combine efforts designed to protect "innocent" women with those designed to punish "bad" women: i.e., prostitutes.In this article, I examine how narratives of "white slavery" and "trafficking in women" function as cultural myths, constructing particular conceptions of migration for the sex industry. The myths around "white slavery" were grounded in the perceived need to regulate female sexuality under the guise of protecting women. They were indicative of deeper fears and uncertainties concerning national identity, women's increasing desire for autonomy, foreigners, immigrants and colonial peoples. To a certain extent, these fears and anxieties are mirrored in contemporary accounts of "trafficking in women." My intent is to lay the two sets of discourses, as it were next to each other, and compare them, to evaluate to what extent "traff...

In December 2000, over 80 countries signed the ‘Protocol to Suppress, Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children’ (The Trafficking Protocol) in Palermo, Italy. The UN Trafficking Protocol was the target of heavy feminist lobbying during the two years in which the negotiations took place. The lobby efforts were split into two ‘camps’, deeply divided in their attitudes towards prostitution. One lobby group framed prostitution as legitimate labour. The other considered all prostitution to be a violation of women’s human rights. Not only feminist NGO networks were deeply divided over the issue of prostitution. Many state delegations used the negotiations as an opportunity to denounce the evils of prostitution, while others (fewer in number) argued that focusing on prostitution detracted from the efforts to come to an agreement on trafficking. These differences were most ferociously fought out during debates on the proposed definition of trafficking, with the pivotal term ‘consent’. This article is an examination of the role played by sex workers in these debates, and of ‘sex work’ in competing definitions of trafficking in women.

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Trafficking in women’ has, in recent years, been the subject of intense feminist debate. This article analyses the position of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as justification for its own interventionist impulses. The central argument of this article is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. This argument is advanced through a comparison of Victorian feminist campaigns against prostitution in India with contemporary feminist campaigns against trafficking. The term ‘injured identity’ is drawn from Wendy Brown's (1995) States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Brown argues that certain groups have configured their claims to inclusion in the liberal state in terms of ‘historical ‘injuries’. Antoinette Burton (1998) extends Brown's analysis to look at Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire, arguing that the ‘injured identities’ of colonial ‘others’ were central to feminist efforts to mark out their own role in Empire. This paper builds on Burton's analysis, asking what role the ‘injured identities’ of third world sex workers play in the construction of certain contemporary feminist identities. The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how CATW feminists position the ‘trafficking victim’ in their discourse. If ‘injured identity’ is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of ‘third world trafficking victims’ in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about the possible repressive consequences of CATW's efforts to combat ‘trafficking in women’ through ‘protective’ legislation.