Reviving Public Outrage About a Longstanding Problem:

Trafficking in human beings is widely recognized as a lucrative racket and a major aspect of the crime problem in a great many source, transit, and destination countries across the globe. But it is not a new development: Its victims were first discovered over 100 years ago. (The slave trade that brought Africans in chains to the Americas during the age of European colonialism is a different problem that goes back further in history, and its horrors transcend the confines of crime and victimization.)

During the early years of the twentieth century, a world- wide movement against “white slavery” arose. Its stated goal was to stop prostitutes from Europe from being sent to brothels throughout the colonial empires of the Western powers. The sexual enslavement of white females eventually proved to be what social scientists call a moral panic because the problem turned out to be far smaller and less significant than was pop- ularly depicted. And yet, the campaign to stop it led to a series of treaties, including the International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic (1904), the League of Nation’s International Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children (1921) and its Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Women of Full Age (1933), and the United Nation’s Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1949) (Lobasz, 2009).

Compelling girls and women to take part in the sex trade is only part of this problem. The other part is the eco- nomic exploitation of migrant workers who are smuggled across borders to toil in homes, factories, and fields. Starting in the late 1980s, reformers began to call attention to their plight. A number of factors came together to heighten con- cern and provoke outrage: a new focus by human rights groups on the many ways females are exploited around the world; the growing desperation in many societies of single mothers to find ways to support their children (what sociol- ogists call the feminization of poverty); the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, which caused many young women to search for a means of survival abroad; environmental degradation due to the mismanage- ment of natural resources that triggered large-scale migra- tions across national borders of workers seeking opportunities in a rapidly globalizing economy; and the con- solidation of organized crime’s hold over the smuggling of weapons, drugs, and people (Jahic and Finckenauer, 2005; Lobasz, 2009;Chuang, 2010; and Smilowitz, 2014).

When prominent people began to characterize human trafficking as “a form of modern-day slavery” and warn that profiting from the “controlled service” of others was one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world, a social move- ment developed to oppose it. It brought together international organizations, human rights groups, religious leaders, charitable organizations, political figures, criminal justice officials, social workers, victim advocates, and thousands of well-intentioned grassroots “abolitionists” motivated by stirring phrases like “free the slaves” and “break the chains of bondage.” Two rather unlikely allies joined together to campaign for stronger laws against sex trafficking. The first were certain American feminists who viewed prostitution as an entrenched institution of male dominanceandits female providers assubordinatescompelled to sell their bodies because of a lack of meaningful economic alternatives. The second political force was a coalition of con- servative evangelical Christians, whose concerns about men who take advantage of “fallen women” stemmed from matters of conscience and strongly held beliefs about purity, innocence, virtue, sin, evil, and immorality. Their religiously motivated crusade centered on preserving traditional marriages and fami- lies rather than on liberating women from subordination to patriarchal control by opening up better opportunities that would enable them to become financially independent (see Chuang, 2010; and Bernstein, 2010).