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.
The First World War: Sex as Military Logistics
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.
The Second World War: The Comfort Women System and European Organized Exploitation
We touched on the comfort women system in our colonial episode, but it belongs in the twentieth-century war context as well, because it represents the fullest twentieth-century expression of state-organized sexual exploitation.
The Imperial Japanese Army's system of organized sexual slavery for its military personnel, operating from the early 1930s through the end of the war in 1945, was not a spontaneous development or a regional anomaly. It was a systematic, intentionally organized military logistics operation. It was administered by the army. It was supplied through active recruitment campaigns in occupied territories. It was sustained by specific regulations about how soldiers could access the women held in comfort stations. And it was designed, at least partly, as a response to the mass rape by Japanese troops in Nanjing in 1937 — a military command decision that the organized system would be more controllable than allowing unregulated sexual violence.
This is a piece of logic worth pausing on. The comfort women system was in part a response to mass rape. The solution to uncontrolled sexual violence against women was organized institutional sexual violence against women. The military command had not confronted the problem of male soldiers using violence against women. It had simply bureaucratized that violence, applied it to a designated population of primarily colonized women, and declared it a solution. The women had not been taken out of the violence. They had been put into a more efficiently organized version of it.
In Europe, the Nazi occupation of much of the continent created its own commercial sex economy, with forced sexual labor in concentration camp brothels — yes, this existed — and the exploitation of desperate women in occupied countries being among the most documented and least discussed aspects of the German occupation.
The postwar period produced something new: a substantial organized crime interest in commercial sex. With the wartime disruption of conventional economies, the displacement of millions of people, and the general social upheaval of the reconstruction period, trafficking networks that had operated on a small scale before the war expanded significantly. The connection between organized crime and commercial sex that would define the second half of the twentieth century was substantially built in the chaotic years after 1945.
The Criminalization Wave: America and the World
The early twentieth century in the United States saw what historians call the Progressive Era campaign against "white slavery" — a moral panic that combined genuine concern about the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women with significant racial anxiety about immigration and specifically about whether immigrant men were threatening American (white) women.
The Mann Act of 1910, passed by the US Congress, made it a federal crime to transport women across state lines for "immoral purposes." The law was used to prosecute actual trafficking — and it was used to prosecute Jack Johnson, the African American boxing champion who was in a consensual relationship with a white woman. The racial application of anti-trafficking law was not an accident. It was a feature.
The broader criminalization wave in the United States — the closing of red-light districts, the campaigns against regulated brothels that had operated in many American cities, the eventual criminalization of commercial sex as such across most of the country — was primarily completed by around 1920. The women who had worked in regulated establishments, with whatever protections those establishments provided, were pushed into street-level work, into more covert indoor arrangements, and into greater dependence on third parties who provided security at the cost of a substantial share of their earnings and their autonomy.
This effect — criminalization pushing an industry underground and increasing the vulnerability of its participants — was observable, documented by social reformers and public health workers, and repeatedly predicted by people who understood the industry's economics. It did not slow the criminalization campaigns. This is partly because the campaigns were not actually primarily about protecting the women in the industry. They were about protecting the public moral order from the visibility of the industry. An underground industry, by definition, is invisible. Mission accomplished, from a certain perspective.
The postwar decades in Western countries saw the commercial sex industry operating in a semi-underground state that was simultaneously criminalized and de facto tolerated. Police forces in most major American and European cities engaged in what was functionally a system of managed visibility: street-level sex work was periodically swept off main thoroughfares, arrest rates rose and fell with political pressure, but the industry was not actually eliminated and was not seriously expected to be. The criminalization was largely theatrical — which, again, was fine if the goal was visibility management rather than actual protection of anyone involved.
The Sexual Revolution and Its Complicated Relationship to This Industry
The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s is a complex chapter in this story — complex because it did multiple contradictory things simultaneously.
On one hand, the broader liberalization of sexual culture reduced some of the specific stigma that had historically attached to non-marital sexuality and created at least a cultural space for more open discussion of commercial sex, its conditions, and the people in it. Some of the first organized efforts by people who worked in commercial sex to advocate for their own rights and interests emerged in this period — COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), founded in San Francisco in 1973, was the first significant organization in the United States run by and for people in the industry.
On the other hand, the commercialization and industrialization of pornography that accelerated dramatically in this period — with the legal battles over obscenity being gradually won, with the first wave of commercial adult film production, with the normalization of explicit sexual content as a consumer product — created a new dimension of the commercial sex economy whose relationship to exploitation and consent was and remains deeply contested. The feminist debates of the 1970s and 1980s about pornography — between the anti-pornography feminist position associated with figures like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and the sex-positive feminist position associated with figures like Gayle Rubin and Carol Vance — anticipated many of the debates that still define contemporary policy discussion. The disagreements were real, substantive, and have not been resolved.
The Rise of Trafficking as an International Issue
By the 1980s and 1990s, the combination of global economic inequality, mass migration driven by political instability and economic desperation, and the development of better-organized transnational criminal networks had produced a trafficking problem of genuinely global dimensions.
The end of the Cold War and the opening of formerly closed economies — particularly in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union — created a massive pool of economically desperate young women in countries whose social support systems had collapsed, whose economies had been devastated by the transition from centrally planned to market economies, and whose women faced dramatically limited legitimate economic opportunities. Trafficking networks that operated between these countries and the wealthier countries of Western Europe, North America, and Asia expanded enormously in the 1990s.
The first serious international legal framework to address this — the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, usually called the Palermo Protocol — was adopted in 2000. It defined trafficking in persons for the first time in an internationally agreed legal framework, and its definition — centered on force, fraud, or coercion used to exploit a person — became the foundation for national anti-trafficking legislation across most of the world.
The implementation of that framework, and the debates about what "exploitation" means and when commercial sex becomes trafficking, will carry us directly into the present day, which is where we're going in the next two episodes.
Discussion Questions
Military commercial sex economies were openly organized during both world wars. What does the institutional normalization of this practice tell us about how states have historically viewed the relationship between military power and women's bodies?
The "white slavery" panic combined genuine concern about trafficking with racial anxiety about immigration. How do racial politics continue to shape anti-trafficking discourse today?
Criminalization consistently made commercial sex more dangerous by pushing it underground, and this was observable and documented at the time. Why do you think criminalization remained the dominant policy response despite this evidence?
The feminist debates of the 1970s and 1980s about pornography and commercial sex produced positions that have not been reconciled. Where do you stand in that debate, and why?
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