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- Title
Coercion and Choice: The "Traffic in Women" between France and Argentina in the Early Twentieth Century.
- Authors
CAMISCIOLI, ELISA
- Abstract
This article employs police investigations of the "traffic in women" between France and Argentina in the first three decades of the twentieth century to highlight the multiple narratives in play when contemporaries talked about trafficking and relayed their experiences of it. While the dominant narrative of "white slavery" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized coercion, sexual exploitation, and victimization, many young working-class women described the journey to Argentina in terms of perceived opportunity, whether for money, travel, or freedom. This is not to downplay the social and economic vulnerability of these women and the precarious lives they led in French and Argentine cities. Instead, the article emphasizes the inadequacy of many existing frameworks for discussing sex trafficking, and prostitution more generally, as they rely too heavily on a stark division between coercion and choice.
- Subjects
FRANCE; ARGENTINA; WOMEN; HUMAN trafficking; SEX crimes; SEX work
- Publication
French Historical Studies, 2019, Vol 42, Issue 3, p483
- ISSN
0016-1071
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1215/00161071-7558357