Human Trafficking and Prostitution

On Saturday, June 6th, 1846, the The Leicestershire Mercury and General Advertiser for the Midland Counties published a letter to the editor titled 'Protection of Females.' The letter argues that a major problem facing Victorian England is the (still contemporary) problem of human trafficking and its support of prostitution. The letter begins with a narrative about a girl who is kidnapped while she visits England and enters into a world of abuse and sickness that eventually kills her. While the letter is somewhat vague in its phrasing, the author details how she was shipped from owner to owner and (in the words of the author) "violated."

As someone who used to live in one of the only states to have legalized prostitution, I found the rhetoric in this article to be especially interesting. The relationship between prostitution and human trafficking is both unfortunate and complicated. Many advocates of prostitution argue that human trafficking is a much smaller problem than people characterize it as and that it has more to do with the stigma of prostitution rather than an actual problem of human trafficking. While this argument is (statistically speaking) patently untrue, we see rhetoric deployed in this article in a similar way to demonize prostitution. Prostitution, in the author's eyes, is the sole reason why human trafficking occurs and represents a decline of English society overall. The author calls upon a more 'civilized' era of the past that was free from disease and safe for women. While other posts will touch on this, its surprising to see just how many issues were blamed on prostitution in Victorian England. According to these articles, prostitutes are to blame for the spread of disease, a sharp increase in human trafficking, the decline of good English society, an increase in homosexuality, the spread of poverty, and opium abuse.

What's especially interesting about the way prostitution is characterized in this article is in how its framed as a necessity for women; that somehow we're eliminating prostitution for women's own good rather than addressing the actual problem. Sex work in general is a real profession that, like any other job, has standards for working conditions and reasonable terms under which a worker can do their job. Instead of push for reforms to, say, prevent women from being kidnapped in raped in the first place, both the author and Victorian society were more comfortable with ignoring the issue and putting the blame squarely on women.