After "Abolition": "White Slavery," Migration, and Human Rights in Anti-Trafficking Discourses after World War II

The 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others is often described as an 'abolitionist' Convention. By creating an international legal framework for the 'abolition' of what is known as 'state regulated prostitution', the Convention was conceived as one of the final and effective means in the fight against human trafficking, which -- it was assumed-- would then also stamp out the 'traffic in persons.' In this paper, I analyse the aftermath of the adoption of the 1949 Convention against trafficiking, and, I trace ensuing discursive and political developments of selected anti-trafficking discourses in NGOs and the media. Based on newly discovered archival sources, I will concentrate on a resurgence (or perhaps the continuity?) of the discourse and 'cultural myth' of 'White Slavery' from the 1950s to the 1970s. In particular, I analyze 'white slavery' narratives and the ways they were embedded in and connected with the slowly rising discourse of human rights. This paper challenges the common periodization of 'white slavery' narratives as a prenomenon that disappeared by the middle of the 20th century and traces its continuities in the post-war era until the emergence of the concept of 'sexual slavery.' Both concepts referred to women on the move, whose racialized bodies became the object of intense political negotiations about gender and sexuality, power, labour, and capitalism.