Sex slaves and the surveillance slate: why 'human trafficking' is a dangerous term.

• Author: Russell, Thaddeus
• Position: Culture and Reviews

Her name, like that of nearly all the victims, is unknown. Not older than a teenager, she has large, down-turned eyes, long and wavy hair, and pale skin. She wears a demure white dress, suggesting that the life she lived before she found herself in this dungeon was one of innocence. She stares through the bars of her cage and, because she cannot save herself, prays for rescue. Behind her, a man wearing a bowler hat and a lascivious grin gazes upon his captive prey through the smoke of his cigar. He has paid to rape her and she is powerless to stop him. She is a "white slave."

This girl is a drawing. She existed only in an image that was part of a flood of claims made in the early 20th century, about legions of white American girls and women being held against their will and forced into prostitution. Thousands of newspaper articles, books, sermons, speeches, plays, and films depicted a vast underground economy of kidnappers and pimps holding godlike power over young female sex slaves. Historians now generally agree that those depictions were mostly or entirely fabrications. There is scant verifiable evidence of American women being kidnapped and physically forced into prostitution, or that such a girl in the picture ever existed.

This was no mere harmless mythmaking. The claims made by the movement against "white slavery" helped create, expand, and strengthen the police powers of an array of government agencies. Since the onset of the panic, those agencies have imprisoned and sterilized hundreds of thousands of women who worked as prostitutes, taken their children from them, forced them onto the streets and into dependent relationships with male criminals, and made their jobs among the most dangerous in the world.

Those same government agencies also prosecuted black, Jewish, Latino, and Asian men for simply having intimate relations with white women; tightened restrictions on immigration; established precedents for some of the worst government violations of privacy and civil liberties in American history; and formed the basis of the modern surveillance state.

The contemporary movement against "human trafficking," also described as "modern-day slavery," is strikingly similar to the crusade against white slavery a century ago, both in rhetoric and in implications for individual freedom and state power.

In 1907, the federal government launched its first concerted response to the white-slavery panic when the United States Immigration Commission--known as the Dillingham Commission after its chairman, Sen. William P. Dillingham of Vermont--launched a 12-city investigation into the "importation and harboring of women for immoral purposes." The commission turned up numerous foreign-born prostitutes voluntarily plying their trade, and they encountered some women whom investigators claimed...