What I was writing about was UK press representation of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Or rather, misrepresentation. There were also some heady cultural studies bits about nations and bodies and identity and stuff, but the heart of the 15,000 word beast was some research showing that the key elements in coverage of so-called ‘white slavery’ in the 19th century were all present and correct in current newspaper coverage of sex trafficking. I summarised some of that in my previous post.

Some recent articles, and an exciting conference on the same subject organised by the Central American Women’s Network (at which I was invited to speak, eek) have put this cheery topic back on my radar. After talking to people studying the same issues today, it seems that nothing much has changed since 2007, and in fact the situation has got worse.

Discourse (yes, I said it, I went there! And in the fourth paragraph too!) around sex trafficking is dominated by a single story which has been repeated so often it has become a cliché, despite its distressing content. You probably know it: virginal 15 year old Albanian blonde is promised a job as a waitress, or maybe even kidnapped, and when she arrives in the UK she is beaten and raped and forced to work as a prostitute.

This is real. It does happen. And amazing but severely under-funded organisations like the Eaves Housing Poppy Project can tell you about it, because they spend every day picking up the pieces.

The trouble is that this single story obscures the complex interrelationship of migration, trafficking, and the national and international sex industry, and the many and various routes of women into exploitation. It has helped to establish a set of criteria for ‘legitimate victimhood’ for women who have been trafficked, which excludes a huge number of serious cases and obscures the wider problems faced by women in the sex trade.

As an example, a 2007 headline in the Sunday Express screams “Influx of sex slaves hits UK”. We are told that the Home Office is “struggling to cope with an influx of women immigrants who are being forced into prostitution”. However, several lines down we find the kernel of news the article has grown from: “Home Office figures about to be published will claim that 4,000 new foreign women join the UK sex trade every year.” The categories of migrant women working in the UK sex trade and victims of sex trafficking are collapsed into one without any word of explanation. In fact it is unknown how many of these women have been forced into prostitution. It is unlikely to be 100%.

Because the media, the police, the government and – sadly – a number of campaigns have focused so narrowly on kidnap and involuntary prostitution, migrant women working in the sex trade can find themselves unable to access services when their human rights have been abused. As an example: consider a woman who willingly enters the UK sex trade, but finds that she is forced to hand over all her earnings to her pimp, has no ability to refuse customers and is prevented from leaving. That is slavery, whether she comes from Thailand, Moldova or Bromley.

By conjuring a moral panic based on a discourse of innocence, border violations and kidnap, the media, government and police fail to engage with the risks and problems surrounding ‘domestic’ prostitution. This means that many women working in prostitution continue to be failed by a State that does not offer them protection.

There is another damaging side effect of the repetition and emphasis on this story at the exclusion of all others. If the measure of whether a woman is a ‘sex slave’ or not excludes many or even most women in that situation, it becomes simple enough for people to say there is no problem.

And it seems that by following the version of sex trafficking peddled by the press too closely the police are at risk of missing countless vulnerable women. I was pleased to see an alternative, more informed narrative in this otherwise dismaying recent article about a report criticising the Met for their hamfisted policing of trafficking for sexual exploitation, which seems to consist mostly of raiding brothels and asking women if they’ve been trafficked. The report (“Silence on Violence”) is worth a read, even though it was produced by GLA Conservatives.

Disappointing then that the next day the same old story was being told in the same paper. It’s a moving account of a terrible experience endured by a courageous woman, and I applaud the Guardian for covering the issue and for closely consulting the excellent Eaves Housing Poppy Project. But we need to tell some of the other stories too, or women will continue to be measured against it and found to be less of a victim than they should be.

• Note: In my dissertation I drew heavily on the work of Jacqueline Berman. It’s also worth checking out her draft paper Trafficking in the Illicit: From Trafficking in East and Central European Women to the Biopolitical Management of Migration.

1910 book from the US about the ‘white slave trade’

While we’re still sloshing around in the journalistic sewage unleashed by the Leveson enquiry, it seems like a good time to revisit some research into media misrepresentation I did back in 2007.

I looked at a sample of 316 articles about the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation drawn from UK national newspapers between September 2005 and September 2007. After speaking to some lucky people studying this topic today, I’m sad to say it hasn’t changed much. In fact it hasn’t changed much since, ooh, 1885.

The Maiden Tribute

The publication of a feature on “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885 is often credited as the birth of scandal journalism, and the touchpaper for a moral panic over “white slavery” which rocked Victorian Britain. The similarity with today’s newspaper coverage of trafficking for sexual exploitation is striking. And, frankly, depressing.

The famous Pall Mall Gazette feature describes in titillating detail how “five pound virgins” are sold to lecherous aristocratic blackguards, after being “snared, trapped and outraged either when under the influence of drugs or after prolonged struggle in a locked room”. Thanks to the wonders of the web, the full article is available to read online. What is remarkable about it isn’t so much the contents of the article itself, but the reaction it provoked – a massive pile-on of outraged public opinion, political opportunism and rival newspaper bandwagon-jumping. Here’s a good description of the aftermath.

While it is undeniable that prostitution was widespread in Britain of the 19th century (and it wasn’t a nice life) the actual incidence of kidnap and ‘sexual slavery’ of the form described in The Maiden Tribute has since been subject to scrutiny. Historians, in particular Judith Walkowitz, have highlighted the discrepancy between the reformers’ view and the reality of prostitution in the 1880s, observing that:

the evidence of widespread involuntary prostitution of British girls in London and abroad is slim. During the 1870s and 1880s, officials and reformers were able to uncover a small traffic in women between Britain and the continent, although the women enticed into licensed brothels in Antwerp and Brussels were by no means the young innocents depicted in the sensational stories. Similarly, there undoubtedly were some child prostitutes on the streets of London, Liverpool, and elsewhere; most of these young girls were not victims of false entrapment.

Arguably the popularity of the ‘white slavery’ myth was partly because it offered an easy option of blaming a few evil, anonymous, male individuals for the hardships experienced by women and girls working in prostitution. Confronting the sexual double standard, crushing poverty and ignorance and the vast power imbalance between men and women would probably have landed the blame a little close to home for most readers.

Legitimate victims

Jo Doezema compares the explosion of media coverage of sex trafficking since 2000 (linked to the EU expansion and attendant mass immigration freakout) to the white slavery panic of the 1880s, identifying a number of similar themes – in particular the emphasis on the victim’s ‘innocence’, which she interprets as a device to make a distinction between legitimate victims and ‘guilty victims’: prostitutes. Doezema writes:

Only by removing all responsibility for her own condition from the prostitute could she be constructed as a victim… As with white slavery, ‘innocence’ is established in a number of ways: through stressing the ‘victims’ lack of knowledge of or unwillingness to accede to her fate; her youth — equated with sexual unawareness and thus purity; and/or her poverty.

My content analysis of newspaper articles about trafficking for sexual exploitation absolutely bore this out. Below I’ll do a quick trot through all the different elements identified by Doezema and give you some examples of the way they are played out in the press today.

Youth

The most obviously emphasised characteristic of the victims in the sample of newspapers I studied was youth. In virtually all the coverage the age of the woman was stated, and case studies of teenagers placed the age right at the start of the article. The few cases in which the woman was over 21 (the oldest was 36) stated the age in later paragraphs.

From my sample of 316 articles (which excluded those focused on trafficking in children) showed that 68%  used the word “girl” to describe the trafficked women, and 59% described the women as “young”.

This 2006 example from the Sunday Express opens the article with the age of the victim: “Dana was just 15 when she was brought to Britain on the promise of a summer job selling ice creams in London’s Hyde Park, but she ended up becoming a sex slave, forced to have sex with 50 men a week.” Dana’s youth is emphasised by the childlike associations of ‘ice cream’ and her ‘summer job’, strongly evocative of school. Even ‘London’s Hyde Park’ has a suggestion of a summer holiday. The journalist gleefully sets up a shocking contrast with her following enslavement.

Innocence

Part of the importance of emphasising the youth of the victims is the implication of their innocence. Plenty of articles in the sample described the women explicitly as innocent: “innocent women like Maria”; “innocents… abducted into slavery” (both The Sun in 2006). However, many others conjure the idea of innocence through stressing vulnerability, naivety and terror, in combination with youth. One of the most visually striking is a description of two “girls” like “frightened rabbits” (Detective Constable Andy Justice, quoted in The Mirror, October 2005).

Other articles make very direct reference to their victims’ sexual inexperience as a way to hammer home their moral purity and by implication their ‘deserving’ status: “Until then I’d never even seen stockings before… I was being told I would have to do things with strangers that I had never done with anyone but my husband” (The Sun again, in 2005). Similarly, before “pretty Erica”, a “20 year-old brunette”, fell into the hands of “evil Albanian pimps”, we are informed by The News of the World in 2006 that she had “slept with only two men.” In the Star the preceding year, a “16 year-old…  virgin was forced to service dozens of punters a week.”

There is also a clear narrative pattern of kidnap and deception, which hides the complex and varied experiences and situations of trafficked women, many of whom are not simply snatched from their hometown. 59% of the articles in the sample featured one or more of: kidnap(ped), abduct(ed), lure(d), trick(ed), dupe(d).

Virtually all describe violent forms of coercion, and women are uniformly said to have been brought to Britain, with no admission of agency in their migration. The examples are endless: “They have been kidnapped, raped and abused before being exported” (campaigner Geraldine Rowley quoted in the Daily Mail in 2007), “the tide of eastern European women being brought into Britain” (the Sunday Telegraph, 2005), “duped into coming to Britain on the false promise of jobs as nannies or waitresses only to be forced into sex and brutality” (the Independent on Sunday, 2005).

Whiteness

Although a significant proportion of women are trafficked to the UK from Africa and South Asia, all but a tiny fraction of case studies and examples are Eastern European. Of the articles studied in the sample, 42% mentioned “Eastern Europe(an)”.

The endless list of Marias, Ericas, Natashas, and Francescas are also a way to create a titillating image of suffering in which virginal white women are left thrillingly at the mercy of swarthy foreigners. A “tiny terrified blonde” (People magazine, 2007) in the hands of an Albanian pimp.

Another journalist writes:

Back then the women for sale were mostly South Asian, Filipinas and Thai… But these new girls were blonde… And very young. Clearly export models from Eastern Europe had flooded the market, forcing up the quality.

– Janice Turner, The Times, December 3, 2005

Nice. Way to put presumably lower ‘quality’ Asian women in their place.

One of my favourite quotes (read: quotes that make me want to punch things) was from Denis MacShane, who wrote:

We are facing a new slave trade, whose victims are tortured, terrified East European girls rather than Africans.

– Daily Telegraph, January 3, 2006

In fact the “new slave trade” includes large numbers of African women, but they are conveniently erased from the narrative.

In the second part of this post I’ll look at the significance and danger of the return of ‘white slavery’ narratives to the pages of the UK press.

Read part 2 here.