There is a common perception that development policies in the 1980s (in the wake of the debt crisis) such as SAPs, have led to an increase in 'traffic in women', or the forced transport of women into the sex industry. The reasoning behind this assumption is that women, who bear the brunt of economic reform, become 'ready prey' for traffickers with false promises of jobs overseas. Alternatively, development policies are blamed for the impoverishment that causes families to sell their children, especially daughters, into prostitution. Development policies are also seen to encourage 'sex-tourism'. According to this analysis, impoverished women and children 'offer themselves' to wealthy, western, male, tourists, who 'develop a taste' for 'exotic' sexuality, thus creating a market for 'trafficking in women' in the developed world.

It is reported there are some 1.6 million missing children a lone in the US. Approximately only two thirds of those children are ever heard from again. White slavery not only is about about women and girls but also male children and the numbers are increasing annually. Much of the attention, however little tends to be more focused on missing women and female children even though statistically the numbers suggest that 30% of those missing are actually male children.

The campaign against 'trafficking in women' has gained increasing momentum world-wide, but in particular among feminists in Europe and the United States, in the last two decades. This current campaign is not the first time that the international community has become concerned with the fate of young women abroad. Modern concerns with prostitution and 'trafficking in women' have a historical precedent in the anti-white-slavery campaigns that occurred at the turn of the century. Feminist organizations played key roles in both past and present campaigns.

While current concerns are focused on the exploitation of third world/non-western women by both non-western and western men, concerns then were with the abduction of European women for prostitution in South America, Africa or 'the Orient' by non-western men or other subalterns. Yet, though the geographical direction of the traffic has switched, much of the rhetoric accompanying the campaigns sounds almost completely the same. Then as now, the paradigmatic image is that of a young and naive innocent lured or deceived by evil traffickers into a life of sordid horror from which escape is nearly impossible.

The mythical nature of this paradigm of the 'white slave' has been demonstrated by historians. Similarly, recent research indicates that today's stereotypical 'trafficking victim' bears as little resemblance to women migrating for work in the sex industry as did her historical counterpart, the 'white slave'. The majority of 'trafficking victims' are aware that the jobs offered them are in the sex industry, but are lied to about the conditions they will work under. Yet policies to eradicate trafficking continue to be based on the notion of the 'innocent', unwilling victim, and often combine efforts designed to protect 'innocent' women with those designed to punish 'bad' women: i.e. prostitutes.

In this report, we examine how narratives of 'white slavery' and 'trafficking in women' function as cultural myths, constructing particular conceptions of the issue of migration for the sex industry. The myths around 'white slavery' were grounded in the perceived need to regulate female sexuality under the guise of protecting women. They were indicative of deeper fears and uncertainties concerning national identity, women's increasing desire for autonomy, foreigners, immigrants and colonial peoples. To a certain extent, these fears and anxieties are mirrored in contemporary accounts of trafficking in women. Our intent is to lay the two sets of discourses, as it were next to each other, and compare them, to evaluate to what extent 'trafficking in women' can be seen as a retelling of the myth of 'white slavery' in a modern form.
 

Until recently, very little examination of the modern anti-trafficking movement from a discourse perspective has been done: that is, a critical examination of the ideology, organization, and strategies of the anti-trafficking movement. The 'white slavery' campaign, in contrast, has been the studied by feminist and non-feminist historians alike (Bristow 1977, 1982; Connelly 1980, Walkowitz 1980, Rosen 1982, Gibson 1986, Corbin 1990, Grittner 1990, Guy 1991, Fisher 1997, Haveman 1998).