A History of Sex as a Business 07 | The 20th Century: Wars, Migration, and the Criminalization Wave

A History of Sex as a Business 07 | The 20th Century: Wars, Migration, and the Criminalization Wave30 jul17 min

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<html>What if the twentieth century's most passionate campaigns to protect women from commercial sex actually made the women in it less safe, less visible, and harder to reach with help — and what if the people running those campaigns knew it and kept going anyway?That is not a comfortable question. It does not let anyone off the hook — not the campaigners, not the politicians, not the moralists, and not the researchers who watched the evidence accumulate and struggled to translate it into policy change. But it is an accurate description of one of the most important paradoxes in the modern history of this industry.We are now in the twentieth century — the era of mass warfare, mass migration, the rise of global organized crime, the sexual revolution, and the beginning of what we might call the modern policy debate. It is a century that transformed the industry beyond recognition in some ways and preserved its most fundamental dynamics in others.<h3>The First World War: Sex as Military Logistics</h3>By the time the First World War began in 1914, the relationship between military operations and commercial sex was so well established that both the Allied and Central Powers treated it as a matter of military logistics rather than a moral question.The French military, which had the longest institutional history of organized military commercial sex, ran what were called maisons de tolérance — tolerated houses — for its troops from the war's early days. These were not improvised or unofficial. They were organized, regulated, and in some cases directly administered by military authorities. Appointments were scheduled. Medical inspections were conducted. Prices were set. Queues outside these establishments in garrison towns became a normal feature of wartime photographs. The British army, whose government was more publicly squeamish about official sanction, effectively tolerated equivalent arrangements without the same explicit institutional structure.The German military had its own organized system. The armies of the Ottoman Empire, in the various theaters where they operated, had theirs. This was, in the most literal sense, an industry that was deployed as part of the machinery of modern industrialized warfare.The women in these systems were not primarily there by enthusiastic choice. They were there because the economic conditions of wartime — with men mobilized and conventional employment for women limited — made it a survival option. They were there because displacement, occupation, and the social disruption of war removed the family and community structures that might otherwise have provided economic alternatives. They were there because enterprising procurers followed the armies and recruited in exactly the conditions of desperation that war creates. The military organization did not create the coercion. It organized and profited from it.The interwar period and the beginning of international discussion about what was being called "the traffic in women" — the phrase used in early League of Nations discussions that prefigured the modern language of human trafficking — saw genuine efforts to document and address the international movement of women across borders for commercial sex. The League of Nations' Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, established in 1921, produced some of the first serious international data on the scale of cross-border movement of women into commercial sex. The findings were sobering: the traffic was substantial, the victims were overwhelmingly economically vulnerable women from countries with limited economic opportunities, and the demand came primarily from wealthier countries with more developed commercial sex economies.<h3>The Second World War: The Comfort Women System and European Organized Exploitation</h3>We touched on the comfort women system in our colonial episode, but it belongs in the t