Female ‘Traffickers’ and Urban Danger

The examination of the LVA’s case load offered here indicates that notions of respectable and disreputable womanhood were subsumed within the LVA’s nebulous discourse around white slavery. Women who were deemed by their patrollers to be a bad influence on others were cast as potential ‘traffickers’. Indeed, setting a supposedly bad moral example to other women was enough to be construed as engaging in a form of trafficking across moral boundaries. Consequently, the LVA’s references to white slavery tell us much more about the organisation’s own moral codes than they do the extent of coerced or forced prostitution in the city.