Abstract
In March of 2024, Alabama Senator Katie Britt memorably delivered the Republican rebuttal to U.S. President Joe Biden's State of the Union address. Seated in her kitchen, Britt's facial expressions alternated between breathy, forced smiles and stern glares as she railed against what she saw as the president's radical leftist agenda. It only took her four minutes to bring up sex trafficking. She vividly recounted meeting a victim on the Texas side of the southern border who was kidnapped as a child by “the cartels” and then forced to have sex with men “over and over again for hours and hours.” For Britt, this girl's ordeal symbolized the horrors of Biden's open border policy, which she urgently called on him to end. 1 This strategy of invoking sex trafficking to advocate for stricter border policies is nothing new and, as the historian Elisa Camiscioli documents in her book, Selling French Sex: Prostitution, trafficking, and global migrations, has a long history in places as varied as the United States, France, Cuba, and Argentina.
Looking primarily at the interwar years of the twentieth century, Camiscioli, a professor at Binghamton University (State University of New York), writes about international and national efforts to restrict the movement of women, namely French women, who sold sex. Some of these campaigns focused on preventing the notorious white slave traffic, which was defined as the coerced prostitution of white women. Others targeted migrating women who consented to sex work. French sex workers faced the most scrutiny because they were considered uniquely depraved for their willingness to perform “novel” sex acts that their counterparts from other nations, like Cuba and the U.S., would not (p.73).
At the international level, the new League of Nations focused its attention on the problem of sex trafficking, favoring a system of “information collecting” to determine the number of foreign women working in a country's brothels and whether or not they had been coerced (p. 44). Under this initiative, the League sent its investigators to probe the lives of sex workers throughout the western hemisphere, publishing an influential report on trafficking in 1927. Individual nations like the United States and Cuba, meanwhile, pushed for legislation that targeted foreign sex workers in general, even if they had not been trafficked. The U.S. sponsored a series of laws in 1903, 1907, 1910, and 1917 that barred “immoral [European] women” from crossing the Atlantic and then stepped-up the enforcement of these laws in the interwar period (p. 31). And Cuba followed suit with new acts that excluded and deported “undesirable” women, usually defined as French (p. 47).
Interestingly, the French government defended its sex workers from censure, believing that it was their natural right as citizens in a republic to migrate for work overseas. The French would only agree to legislation that prohibited white slavery or underage sex, which became a point of contention with its staunchly abolitionist ally, the United States.
Camiscioli is critical of these exclusionary policies. For all their talk about protecting vulnerable women, states and international bodies rarely prioritized that goal; their emphasis, rather, was on prohibition and deportation. The net result was that all young women traveling alone, not just trafficking victims and sex workers, were subject to a regime of surveillance and inspection, which impeded their mobility.
Wherever possible, Camiscioli attempts to move beyond the viewpoint of the state and piece together the actual motivations that drove French working-class women to undertake migration for sex work. She describes them as people with “limited economic options” and difficult choices to make about their future (p. 92). Because of their precarious existence, they frequently had to put themselves in situations where the “line between involuntary coercion and voluntary choice” was blurred and ever-shifting (p. 92). The discourse of white slavery, with its stock characters of helpless virgins and criminal pimps, fails to capture migrants’ more complicated lived experiences.
French sex workers, like other vulnerable laborers under capitalism, made rational and quite brave decisions to migrate overseas for better opportunities. For many, a crucial early step was negotiating the complicated process of securing a forged passport and then, afterward, following exact instructions on how to successfully wield it at the border. Sometimes these migrations worked out in the long run; a young woman who had struggled in France might, after several years in South America, acquire enough capital and experience to manage her own brothel. Or, sometimes, things did not go as planned; a pimp might pocket most of a woman's earnings, leaving her destitute. If a migrant sex worker decided to flee their adopted country, they often found that by invoking the tropes of the trafficking narrative (that their work had been coerced), they could gain the sympathy of French immigration officials who had the power to repatriate them at government expense. Here, repatriation was essentially a free trip home that was less punitive than deportation.
The savviness that Camiscioli's historical migrants displayed can no doubt also be found in today's immigrants, which got me thinking about the therapeutic potential that these stories hold. Social workers might encounter migrants who at some point in their journey suffered trauma or presently feel trapped in a difficult situation. As part of their intervention, practitioners could help their client recall examples of courage, resolve, and tough decision-making that informed their migration and could now be used as a reservoir of strength. Such an approach would be a feminist alternative to what Camiscioli sees as the still all-too-common approach to anti-trafficking and rescue work that includes arrest, detention, and an obsession with deciding who is worthy of compassion.
