Sex trafficking is a framework for understanding commercial sex exchanges that draws on socially potent narratives about immigration, race, gender, and sexuality. More than any other institution, the media have been central in establishing this framework as credible and legitimate, despite various concerns that have been raised by critics about the problematic nature of sex trafficking journalism and the activist organisations it spawns. Indeed, ending sex trafficking has become the most popular humanitarian cause of the new millennium. Today the cause is as likely to be championed by human rights activists as it is celebrities, evangelical Christians, Mormon activists, high school and college students, politicians, feminists, or women’s magazine readers. This unlikely collection of activists has promoted the belief that sex trafficking is not only rampant, but it is one of the worst abuses imaginable.
For Western societies, sex trafficking first surfaced as a key political, social, and moral topic during the 1880s in England, when a social purity activist asked the crusading journalist William T. Stead to help push forward stalled age-of-consent legislation in Parliament. The result was a scandalous piece titled the “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” which described the auction of a vast number of virgins to London’s wealthy aristocrats. Stead’s methods and conclusions were problematic, but he succeeded in his quest to raise the age of consent in England and triggered an international movement to end the traffic in women.
The sex trafficking framework that Stead popularised eventually made its way to the US. In the wake of Stead’s piece, English social purity activist Josephine Butler toured the US declaring that the 15th Amendment had failed to liberate a new class of slaves: female prostitutes. Inspired by Stead and Butler, temperance and social purity groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union began to demand that US editors use Stead as an example and print stories of sex trafficking in their papers. Newspapers at the time were hesitant to openly discuss sex or prostitution for fear that this content would be perceived as immoral. However, social purity movements taught editors that they could report on the horrors of prostitution-as-sex-trafficking without incurring charges of prurience. At the behest of social purity activists, newspapers in the US slowly began to publish stories on sex trafficking. In return, activists praised these newspapers in their own social movement publications and encouraged their rank-and-file to patronise them.
