Protecting the Young and the Innocent: Age and Consent in the Enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act

Editorial Note: Special Issue: Migration, Sex, and Intimate Labor

“…9 Jessica R. Pliley, meanwhile, takes this further and examines how these discourses functioned to make invisible the sexual exploitation of Black women in the US. 10 In Britain, which had discursively distanced itself from the history and practice of slavery by the early twentieth century, the term continued to hark back to real and imagined forms of white kidnap and exploitation within the empire, and particularly the sexualized dangers white women were thought to encounter when they traveled to these imperial spaces. 11 The rich scholarship on "white slavery" and trafficking in these contexts demonstrates how these discourses manifested anxieties over maintaining the optics of white supremacy (the idea of white superiority upon which rested the moral authority of empire), and over racial mixing.…”