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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
The Victorian Sex Trafficking Panic
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A
Hello my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets once again. I do have to actually give you quite a spicy fair dues warning today because this is all about sex trafficking in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. So it's going to be a bit of a rough ride. And if you don't want to listen to this one, then fair enough. You don't have to dig one out for the back catalog and we'll see you next time. But for the rest of you, this is an adult podcast book about other adults, about adult things and adulter wake, a range of subjects. You've been adult too, right? Let's get on with it. Buenos Aires at the Paris of the south of the early 20th century, people are speaking Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English and a host of Eastern European languages. A young girl steps off the gang plank, boots squeezing her growing feet. She carries a small bag with her and hurries to keep up with her custodians. A married couple she keeps her eyes on their back, trying not to get lost amongst the dock workers and other arrivals. She's arrived in a whole new world, searching for a life outside of domestic work and a new opportunity for herself. But it's not going to be all that she hoped for. Not by a very long shot. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. In 1910, a 16 year old girl lands in Buenos Aires, Argentina from her home in New Zealand. Her name was Lydia Harvey and within a year she would be in the custody of police officers on the other side of the world in London. Her story is just one of those many girls and women who were trafficked into sexual exploitation. Today I'm joined by the wonderful Dr. Julia, late author of the Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, to hear about sex trafficking in the early 1900s and why there was such a moral panic around it. Was it worse than it was before? Was it a new thing that was happening? Or was it just people were frightened that it was and what would the experience have been like for the women that survived it? Right, are you ready to do this? I know I am. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Julia late. How are you doing?
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B
I'm grand. It's lovely to be back.
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A
Oh, thank you for coming back. I have so much fun talking to you about all things, I was going to say Victorian and sexual, but we're actually, we're into the Edwardians today talking about the ever perky topic, sex trafficking. Julia, how did you come to research this? What a subject to research the history of sex trafficking.
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B
I found my way to the history of trafficking through the history of sexual labor more generally. Right. So my first book was about prostitution in London and quite quickly you start realizing that trafficking is a big part of that story. And then I got more and more interested in migration and they kind of come together in that topic. So yeah, that's how I came to it.
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A
There is a huge panic in the Victorian period, as you well know. But you can tell us a little bit about why this explosion of moralizing concern erupts in the 19th century, which then feeds into the 20th century. Why do they suddenly become so panicked about this?
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B
It's a really good question because of course, you know, women have been subjected to sexual violence, you know, for a very long. So what was new about this moment? And I think it's a little bit of like an actual reality changing and also a moral panic about what that changing reality Means. So there's a kind of explosion in migration. This is a kind of migration revolution era, particularly for younger women. Women are leaving rural places to go to cities to work. They're leaving cities to go to other cities, across oceans to work. Transportation is cheaper, the global job market is growing and women are off seeking more opportunities for themselves. And that, of course, subjects them to more actual exploitation and violence and those sorts of things. But it also makes the patriarchy, to use a shorthand, incredibly nervous and anxious because women are no longer in the protected space of the home. Right. They're. They're going out, they're being on surf unsupervised in dance halls and they're going to cinemas.
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A
Surely not.
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B
Yeah, right, Like. And so part of the worry is about their freedom. Right. And so there's this. It's a little bit of both, because these, you know, when I talk about trafficking, I don't want to make it sound like, you know, this wasn't happening.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But at the same time, the way it was happening wasn't the way that they were panicking about.
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A
And there was a real panic. I mean, you get it. It starts in the 19th century. You've got all this moralizing with Contagious Diseases Act. We have the great social evil, and then we have this thing that happens, the maiden tribute of modern Babylon. You have this expose about children being sold to rich men for sexual exploitation. And then this panic grips all of the papers and you get almost like this. I can't remember the language being used, but it's like white slave trade, I think, that you start seeing it then.
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B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it kind of starts a little bit earlier than the maiden tribute of modern Babylon, so in the late 1870s. And it comes right out of the Contagious Diseases Acts, those campaigners who were campaigning against the acts that subjected women to forcible confinement and forced inspection if they were suspected of having a venereal disease. The people who were protesting that law started seeing it as part of the story of trafficking. Right. So because the countries that had regulation in place, these forcible inspections, they were also the countries that had regulated brothels. And these spaces were seen as places where women were heavily exploited. And so that campaign started to campaign against what they started to call the traffic in women or white slavery. We'll come back to that extremely problematic term. I think. Yes, I think we will. A bunch of sort of religious reformers and political reformers and early feminists got together and started investigating the traffic between England and Belgium. Specifically, why Belgium?
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A
What did they do?
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Belgium? Because it was one of the places that had regulated brothels and it was generally considered even worse than France in terms of sort of depravity and specifically police corruption. So in 79, 1879, there was this big expose which gave rise to a special commission in the House of Lords and they came up with a new law trying to make the very first law against trafficking. But they were having trouble passing it because one of the things it did is increase the age of consent from 13 to 16. And the MPs in parliament were very upset about this because they worried that their sons would just accidentally mistake a 13 year old for a woman who was of age and then accidentally eventually come under this law. Oh, boo hoo. Right. So, you know, there was this laughing.
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A
That's not funny. That's just. That's mad. Okay. You know, you can just ask.
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B
It's funny because it's true.
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It's funny because it's true. Yeah, it's just. Oh, God. Okay.
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B
And that's where this kind of thing about these, like, overly free women come in. Because they said, oh, but you know, these girls are so precocious. Right. You can't be trusted. They look so much older than they really are, et cetera, et cetera. And so it looked like the law wasn't going to get passed. And so then Josephine Butler and the Salvation army went to William Stead, who was this muckraking journalist, a sensational reporter who conducted this investigation.
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A
I think of him as like the Piers Morgan of the age. Like, he's into scandal, he's into, like, he has this kind of righteous anger, but it's also kind of caught up with his own publicity machine as well. Yeah, that's kind of how I see him.
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B
I think if I was going to be trapped on a boat, I would definitely pick Williamstead. But I think there's definitely parallels to be drawn.
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A
And he died on a ship. He died on the Titanic. Random fact.
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B
I remember that went down the Titanic. He was conducting the band. He stayed with the band. Played their way down. Yeah, yeah. And actually that's next to the story that, that we're telling here as well. We'll get to that maybe too.
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A
Okay.
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B
But yeah, so Stead conducts this investig and part of the investigation, he buys a virgin, you know, just to prove he's problematic. Yeah, this is where it gets really problematic, you know, in campaigning against trafficking, William Stead and his colluders essentially become traffickers. They buy a girl, they forcibly Inspect her for virginity, they transport her to France. And ultimately one of the very first people who came under the new law that did get passed because of this newspaper scandal was William Stead and he went to jail for it. So you know, it's very ironic, but he saw that as like, well, first of all a great bit of self publicity, but also a kind of self murdering. But the law that does come out of it and this scandal is enormous. It is the biggest selling newspaper scandal of all time.
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Huge.
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B
Maybe Profumo tips it, but I'm not even sure it's huge. It's international. People are like lining up outside of every major newspaper around the world to get their hands on a copy of this.
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A
And you know, I studied it a little bit and one of the weird ripple effects you get it is you get all these little local newspapers like out in the sticks that are responding to it, that have their own white slave trade watch that they're desperately searching for like their own example. But it's like in the Cotswolds or like, you know, it's like somewhere in the arse end of Cumbria and they're all like, they're like gathered with their pitchforks like ready, waiting to find their own version. And then it kind of disappears after like two weeks. Like, yeah, we didn't find any, we didn't find any slave trades in the Kendal area.
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B
It's a classic moral panic. But of course there's always a suspicion because in any one of these spaces in the Cotswolds in rural Wales, there are girls who quote unquote have disappeared. But they haven't actually disappeared, they've just gotten on a train in search of a better life. They haven't actually been trafficked, but the presumption is something terrible must have happened
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to them, must have happened.
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Whereas they might be just living their best life hanging out in a Soho cafe.
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A
So we get this like real global, like this bomb drops about. There's. Oh my God, there's a trade in, in virgins and in women and children. How does this, I mean, does it calm down as we get, as we get into the 20th century, or does this kind of feed on itself and it becomes a bigger panic?
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B
I think it feeds on itself. Like any moral panic, there's a bit of a cyclical, you know, like it falls out of the news cycle a little bit. But really from 1885 right up until 1912, which is the next of beat, I guess in the story, there's little bits of white slavery. This you Know, trafficking, that peppering the press. It would be rare for a week or two to go by without some major newspaper covering some kind of story about white slavery.
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A
And what do they mean by that? Let's talk about that term. White slavery, as you said, very problematic. But what did they mean by that?
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B
They meant so many things, which is one of the reasons it's so hard to work with it. As a historian, I. At its simplest, it was literally just a euphemism for prostitution. So some people used it interchangeably with prostitution. The people who did that usually were implying that prostitution was inherently exploitative, but not all the time. Sometimes they were just using it as a synonym. That's probably less common than this idea that prostitution was a form of slavery for women. And this comes out of the fact that a lot of the people who start this campaign were inspired by the abolitionists, the people who campaigned to end chattel slavery, which they would have seen as black slavery. And so they decide, through what can only be described as a sort of racist ignorance, that white slavery is a good term to describe this new form of slavery where women are being enslaved. But, of course, we can already see problems with that. Right. First of all, the vast majority of women who are being exploited in commercial sex are not white around the world. So let's just begin with that. And the other thing is that it was being used as sort of to invoke a specter that was somehow worse than chattel slavery. Right. So, oh, this is even worse because it's white women who are being subjected to these harms, which was an erasure of black suffering and also a total denial of the fact that black women under chattel slavery were subjected to incredible sexual exploitation. And so it just erases and erases and erases. It's such a deeply racist term, and yet it's the term that everyone uses.
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A
It's so problematic. And it feeds into this legacy that we have that's still around today of the virginal white woman who's under attack and under duress. That was used unemployed. I mean, you've only got to look at the horrific history of lynching in America to see how that worked. The idea of, you know, we must save the white woman at all costs, it's doing that as well.
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B
Yeah, exactly. And it's no coincidence that this panic about trafficking and about white slavery, specifically, that racialized panic, is happening at the exact time that the world is discovering scientific racism. Right. That they're inventing, I should say, scientific racism, and the idea that there's this, you know, a risk of national or racial degeneration if your national stock gets polluted with bad blood.
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Oh, it's all sounding horribly familiar.
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B
Yeah. Right. I mean, plus Sachs. Right. It's, it's very depressing to work on this.
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It really is. Did they have any sense, like, because it's, it's also very nebulous, this just white slavery. It doesn't really give you any idea other than race about who is being enslaved or, or who they think is doing the enslaving.
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B
Yeah, that's exactly it. I think you touched on it when you said about the whiteness also means purity or virginity or sexual purity. So the imagined victim of white slavery was a virgin girl, usually under the age of 18 or certainly under the age of 21. That was who. The imagined victim, the imagined perpetrator was often racialized as Jewish. So there was an incredible panic about that was rooted, profoundly rooted in the kind of residence of anti Semitism again that you see from the 1880s on as Jews are leaving Eastern Europe and migrating to other parts of the world. So the Jewish man is seen as the trafficker, as the kind of Ur figure of the trafficker. And you see that racialization in the imagery as well. So he was kind of the main person thought of as the trafficker. But the other kind of stereotypes would have been French men, Italian men, Belgian men, working class men, overwhelmingly, because they were the ones who were working as pimps, soutenurs and traffickers within these regulated brothel systems of continental Europe. So the perpetrator was racialized in all kinds of ways, but the victim was always an innocent white girl.
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It's the Victorians do that. I say the Victorians, but actually I think that we still do that is they create this perfect victim. And you can find really stark examples of when like the victim narrative doesn't fit. Like these supposed rescue societies that get set up to help all these terrible victims of sex trafficking, then they have rules, but it's like, you know, you can't be an unrepentant prostitute, quote unquote, and you have to be like a first time offender and things like that. And it's just like, do you really want to help people? Like what is going on here?
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B
Yeah, they didn't want anybody who they didn't see as reformable. Right. And they didn't want anybody who might pollute the thoughts of the girls who were reformable. So overwhelmingly these reform homes specialized in taking women under the age of majority, so under 18, under 20 and those women were expected to perform, you know, their, their attorney. Right. Their penitence, even when it got less heavy handed, there was still this idea that being retrained. But the irony is they're retraining them into the exact occupations that they left in the first place. Seeking better lives. Right. So they're being taught how to do domestic service and they're being made to work in laundries. And those are exactly the things that they were fleeing. And that's what ended them up in situations where they were, you know, they were at risk, they were vulnerable, they. They became victims of sexual violence.
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It's all performative, isn't it? It's performative rescuing. Really, that's what's going on here. This is a problematic question, and I don't mean to sound like a dickhead when I say this, but what I want to say is like, is it true? That's just. Yeah, I've said that. Now that sounds clumsy, but like, was there any truth to any of this panic? Were women being trafficked? Were children being kidnapped? Was there reason for this? Or was this just a fear that fed on itself and an infected far too many people?
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B
I think there absolutely were very real cases. I mean, my book, the disappearance of Lydia Harvey. Demonstrations.
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Yeah, we'll talk about her.
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B
One but one of many. And I think, you know, living through the era of the Epstein files, we have to be eyes wide open about the fact that there are actually highly organized cabals of very horrible people who are systematically abusing young women for the pleasures of the rich. Right. And I know because I've seen similar cases, I've seen the echo of this down through the past. This had to have been happening. Unfortunately, those are also the people who are best at hiding what they're doing. And they are the people who are least likely to come under the force of the law. They're the people who have the most money to pay off the cops.
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A
And they tend to target the people who are least likely to be missed. That they're already outside of that perfect victim narrative, which makes it very difficult for them to even raise any concerns. That happens all the time. This idea that there's a pure virginal young girl from a well to do family who all of this stuff, it's like that is a very narrowly defined version of events. And people that fall outside of that. How do they have their voices heard?
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B
Yeah, that's exactly the right question to ask. They didn't ultimately. Right. Because even if they did, that would fall down in court. Because the jury and the judge are expecting to see this perfect victim. And most cases of trafficking, what was almost certainly not happening is that the Victorian moral panic, which was innocent young girl shows up at train station, gets stuck with hypodermic syringe and thrown into attack and then brought to a brothel where there's no doorknobs so they can't get out, like that sort of stuff
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A
by a Belgian Jewish man from Eastern Romania.
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B
Exactly like that. That was almost certainly pure fantasy. Or so rare. So very, very rare. Almost all cases of trafficking start with girls who are making decisions about their own lives. Right. They've decided, yeah, I am going to go with this man to South America because I'm sick of the life I'm leaving. I don't want to work 80 hours a week in domestic service to just be able to afford next to nothing. You know, this guy is promising me much more meaningful, better paid work, adventure on a steamship, nice clothes, you know, things that were easy, to be honest, by that. Yeah. And, and, and so, you know, girls would say, yeah, yeah, I'll come with you. And according to the Victorians, and in fact, according to the law, that completely removed them from the status of victim, right. So they couldn't prosecute for trafficking if there was any evidence that she was, quote, and I'm quoting from that 1885 law of known immoral character. So if you can prove that she's of known immoral character, the person who trafficked her did not traffic her at all.
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A
And of course, it completely obliterates the chances of any boys being trafficked. Right. I mean, we saw that in the Cleveland street scandal of the 1880s, where it was exposed that very rich men had been trafficking young post offices boys for sexual favors. The whole thing got hushed up, shushed up, thrown out of court. Nothing happened, really. About that one.
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B
Yeah, yeah. If, in fact, it would have been kind of labor trafficking, that would have been of more concern for boys. But they take a while to figure out that this is all labor trafficking ultimately.
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A
Be back with Julia after this short break. Are you having issues luring an eligible catch with your piano forte? Are you repeatedly being accused of being a witch just because you're single? Here on Betwixt, we often join historical people in the more stressful times of their lives. But just because we don't run into the exact issues of those in the past doesn't mean that modern lives are easy, does it? And it can all feel so much harder if you can't find a therapist who takes your insurance. Ruler is a healthcare company that makes it simple to get high quality mental health care that works with your insurance, not against your budget. They partner with over a hundred insurance plans and Ruler patients typically co pay around $15 per session. When using insurance, there are no wait lists, no endless back and forth emails, just real therapy from vetted professionals with appointments available as soon as tomorrow. Visit ruler.comsheets to get started today. That's R U L A.com sheets. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.
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A
So tell me about Lydia Harvey then, because you wrote a whole book on her. Who was she?
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B
Lydia Harvey was a nobody. A nobody of a girl who grew up in a small town called Oamaru in New Zealand, working as a domestic servant with a single mother and lots and lots of sisters. She eventually goes on to Wellington where she meets a man who calls himself Aldo Cellis and he says, if you come with me, you'll have nice dresses and you'll never want for anything and you'll be really well paid. And like, here's my colleague Marie. Look how fabulous she is. Come with us. And Lydia agrees. And I found her eventually. The reason I know she existed at all is because I found her in a Metropolitan police file from 1910 because she wound up at the end of the day in London.
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A
Wow.
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B
Yeah. And so it was a fairly thick file and I decided to chase it to the ends of the earth to try to figure out, you know, where she came from and what happened afterwards. Right. Because so many trafficking stories have the same anecdotal form, Right? Innocent young girl about which we Hear very little. Has this terrible experience. Oh, isn't it awful? And then she disappears. She just, you know, nobody really cares. And I wanted to know what happened to Lydia afterwards. And so she ends up in London. She ends up being the star witness in the trial against her traffickers, whose real names were Antonio Carvelli and Alexandra de Nicoterra. And then she's eventually repatriated back to New Zealand, where she does go on to live a life. And she falls in love and she performs in the theater and all of those sorts of things. She doesn't have a very long happy ending, but she sort of refuses to just sort of wither and die. She goes on and lives her life.
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A
What happened to Lizzy then? Because she meets a guy in New Zealand who promises her dresses and. Etc, Etc. I'm gonna assume that that deal didn't work out for her. But what happened to her? Do we get a sense of that?
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B
Yeah. So she is bought a steamship ticket from New Zealand to. Well, first to Uruguay. And then that's where she meets her traffickers. So she actually travels alone on the steam ship and meets her traffickers in Montevideo. And then they take a boat to Buenos Aires.
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A
How old is she at this point?
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B
She's 17 years old.
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A
Oh, yeah? Yeah.
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B
She's a very young woman. Girl, I guess, is the better word. And her hair is dyed, she's given nice dresses. Antonio sets her up in illicit brothels. So Buenos Aires had a regulated prostitution system, but they also had an enormous clandestine kind of shadow economy as well. And she becomes part of that, soliciting in a casino, taking men who she described as old, dirty and very horrible back to this flat, forced to perform oral sex on them, which she hated. That was the main form of sex in Buenos Aires for prostitution. She considered it like a really big taboo and really hated it. And then eventually she catches a venereal disease, which is what it was called at the time, an sti, we'd call it now. And the cops get close to figuring out what's going on. So Antonio shoves her on another steamship, locks her in the cabin. So she's there suffering from an STI. Two STIs actually locked in the cabin of a steamship across the Atlantic. Finally ends up in London, where she's put back out on the streets to work. And that's when the cops find her.
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A
Oh, Lydia. So, and what mechanism is being used to force her to work? Are they violent? Do they. I don't know if they had passports actually. In at this period is like, what is the mechanism that they use? I mean, she's all on her own. Where's she gonna go? Who's she gonna talk to?
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B
Part of it is just the sheer isolation and just, you know, the fact she doesn't speak the language. She may not even fully know where exactly in the world she's ended up. She has no money of her own. And another part is that they keep telling her, you know, if you go to the police, they're going to tell your mother, they're going to tell your sisters, your family, everyone's going to find out what it is you've been up to. So it's shame that they're using to keep her in her place. And finally, it's charm. So grooming is a really big part of this, that kind of lover boy method, which is a common thing that happens where, you know, she's been convinced that these people are her friends, that they love her and care for her and, you know, those three sort of forces come together. The isolation, the shame and that kind of friendship.
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A
It's funny how little it actually changes throughout history. That method is still incredibly common in sex trafficking today. Right, yeah.
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B
And massively worsened by the fact that, yeah, we do have passports now. Our borders are much, much more carceral and heavily policed than they were in Lydia's time. So now people who are trafficked are subjected to a fourth threat, which is, we've got your. You don't have papers. Right? If you go to the cops, what's going to happen? You're going to get deported. You're going to get deported back to a place that was so horrible that anything felt better than having to stay there, either because of the sort of geopolitical situation or because of the abject poverty that somebody was living under or because of their. Their terrible home life. You know, people run for all kinds of reasons and unfortunately there are traffickers who take advantage of that. And. And they use the fact that, you know, migration restrictions are so intense now to keep people imprisoned.
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A
What were Lydia's family doing? Just. Did they report her missing? Did they notice that she was missing?
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B
Yeah. So her mum, Emily Baddeley, went to the cops as soon as she sort of clocked that. So at first Lydia said, you know, don't worry, Mum, I'm going with a sheep farmer, I believe it was. I'm going to be their nursemaid. So they've got young children, they're going to South America and I'm going to travel as their nursemaid, which is an Incredibly believable story. Lots of young women would have done exactly that. But eventually Emily Baddeley realized that, you know, things weren't adding up and started seeking out her, her missing daughter and did get, did get an investigation going. But then the Wellington police were basically just telling her, you know, she was a no goodnik who got involved with bad characters, she knows she was already of known immoral character, et cetera, et cetera.
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A
How did the police treat Lydia? I mean, now there's been lots of, hopefully lots of changes in how police treat victims of these kind of crimes, but we don't even have to go back that far. And it's a different picture.
- [33:37]
B
Yeah. And I find it really hard. Right. Because the police are the ones writing this all down, so they get to decide how they look, of course, but I do. With all that being said. So there's this. The officer in charge of the case, Ernest Anderson, actually he does seem like a decent person. He does seem like. He gets very, very cross when the government says they're not going to pay for Lydia Harvey's travel back to New Zealand to her family. And he actually spearheads a fundraising effort to get her the money to get her home. So, you know, there's, there's a degree to which I feel like he cared. His colleague who was working under him, PC Mead, on the other hand, four years later, goes down for kind of extortion and bribery because of the way he was treating women who sold sex in London. So, you know, even within one case we see the whole spectrum of police behavior. But another person was in the story whose name was Eileen McDougall, and she was in charge of taking the witness statements of girls who had been sexually assaulted or who were victims of trafficking. And she, even with her kind of Victorian morality hanging on her, nonetheless was an enormous advocate for victims. She helped craft statements to try to secure convictions. She was very much on the side of the girls, unlike some early women police officers who were definitely not on the side of the girls. And so, yeah, it's a really complicated story. Some things were perhaps a little better back then because there was an Eileen McDougal, but yeah, traffickers. Oh, the traffickers. So they don't get very long in prison. Yeah, surprise, surprise, they don't get long in prison at all. I think they get six months without hard labor because all of the girls involved in the case, because they also trafficked three French girls, but all of them were of varying degrees already of known immoral character. And so they couldn't get them on the worst charge. And they knew that the case was going to fall down because their victims were so deeply imperfect. And so they made a plea deal and that's what they got. So the case never actually went fully to trial because there was a plea bargain. And so after six months, they're deported. I don't know as much about Alexander de Nicoterra after this. I didn't follow him quite as closely. Antonio Cravelli ends up through a long, long, convoluted story back in Australia with his wife Marie, his co trafficker, who was never found by the police, by the way, and eventually is caught. This is one of these truth of stranger than fiction things. He's caught running a dance hall in Hobart, Tasmania. And the reason he's caught is because somebody recognizes him from his trafficking days in early 20th century out in Western Australia. And they recognize him because he has one brown eye and one blue eye. Yeah. And that's how they catch him. And then he's, he's deported for good and eventually dies somewhere in Italy in the 1930s.
- [37:04]
A
When do laws start to change around trafficking? I'm hoping that we don't still have it on the books that you have to be of known good character order to get a conviction.
- [37:13]
B
I mean, we don't have that still in the books. Like it's not actually in statutory law anymore. That got changed in the 1956 Sexual Offenses Act. And then there's been several other attempts to sort of define trafficking legally since. But I think we both know that the character of the victim is of utmost importance in any trial to do with sexual assault and violence and sexual exploitation. And, you know, if you speak to social workers and, you know, solicitors, barristers, now, they'll all say cases fall down when the victimhood isn't perfect enough. Right. And it's almost always the case that a person who's been trafficked for sex, sex work has already been engaged in sex work. And there's still, despite everything, a pervasive belief that that engaging in sex work therefore negates all of your other human rights. And that's still, unfortunately, still happening. And that's even for cases that come to trial, the vast majority don't. Because even when women, I'm saying women actually, but it's not just women. When people are in incredibly exploitative situations because of trafficking, they're still choosing to stay in them because they know that the, you know, the prize for coming forward is first of all, potential threats to their life and second of all, deportation and Once they're deported, they're going back to a place where their life is quite likely forfeit.
- [38:46]
A
What happens to Lydia? Is she okay when she gets back to New Zealand?
- [38:51]
B
Yeah. I mean, through all of my work, I try not to kind of imagine the inner world of the people I'm writing about because, you know, I don't know. So I don't know what traumas she held. I don't know, you know, how she coped with her experience. I don't know if she told anyone other than her very close family who would have. Would have had to have known, but she ends up in Australia. She joins a theater troupe and she ends up in Australia. I think she's a dancer in a theater troupe for a number of years, kind of doing the kind of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Hobart, Hobart circuit. In fact, she may have ended up in Hobart at the same time as Antonio Corbelli for all I know. And she meets the first mate of a ship, a man named Herbert Auchenden, and they fall in love and they get married. And here's a spoiler alert for anyone who wants to read the book. She then goes on to live in Newcastle in Australia, where she contracts the Spanish flu, the 1918 influenza. And so she dies a very young woman. Her husband dies just six months after her, but before he dies, he erects a gravestone for her that's in the shape of a heart. And you can still see it in the. In the cemetery in Newcastle.
- [40:24]
A
Be back with Julia after this short break.
- [40:32]
B
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- [41:01]
C
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- [41:44]
A
How common were cases like Lydia's? Maybe, I don't know, maybe we don't even have the data to be able to answer a question like that. But the fact that it even came to court, the fact that these people were convicted, you know, crap sentence, but they were, and as you said, how many countless others weren't? How typical is this case?
- [42:03]
B
I think it's fairly typical in the sort of pattern of most of the other victims of Antonio Cravelli. So the three French girls who had all already worked in sex work in one way or another, you know, as part of the makeshift economy of their lives. Right. So seamstresses, when there was seamstress work on dairy maids, sex workers, you know, moving in and out of that. And that's a really typical pattern for anyone who migrates for sexual labor under whatever coercive or non coercive conditions. The degree to which this is organized and the way that they're going after Lydia, as a particularly like, like naive young woman does kind of strike me as a little bit rarer, just because I think most people who were third parties in the sex industry would have seen girls like Lydia as more trouble than they were worth. You know, they would have preferred somebody who was more experienced, who was kind of going into sex work with eyes wide open and, and that sort of thing. So I'm not, I'm not really sure how typical. And you're right, the dark figure is enormous because the vast majority of these cases never see the light of day.
- [43:17]
A
So I'm just thinking when you say that about how like the fear of this, the fear of white slavery can be all encompassing and it actually prevents people getting real convictions. And I'm thinking what you're saying there about how that's not really how trafficking works. They don't tend to go for the well to do young virgin because they are high risk victims. And that every once in a while in a Facebook group, some mad person says that, oh, I came out today in the supermarket and there was a can in front of my car. And everyone needs to be careful because that's how sex traffickers find their victims. And I'd look at stuff and I'm like, no, they don't. Yeah, that's you mad person. That's not how this works at all.
- [44:02]
B
Not in the slightest. They find their victims in working class neighborhoods that are filled with people looking for, for Better lives.
- [44:08]
A
That's right. And since time immemorial they are not. Well, I mean, I don't want to say like these things never happen, but the chances of them grabbing somebody outside of Aldi because somebody left a chalk mark on the floor. But isn't it interesting that hysteria is still with us about this?
- [44:24]
B
Very much so. And I mean, and people like the news media dying out on it. They absolutely love it. It's this kind of formulaic like, like circular cyclical retelling. And of course, the, the Taken films with Liam Neeson have a lot to answer for in renewing that kind of panic.
- [44:43]
A
I mean, that was the perfect victim, wasn't it? That was the perfect. Straight from a Victorian sensation magazine, that one.
- [44:50]
B
Yeah, exactly. They really like. They obviously. Well, maybe they didn't do their homework. Maybe this is just like this is. This sort of trope has been in circulation for so long that filmmakers just need to like pluck it out of the air in order to do it. But it really, like that movie actually exemplifies exactly why traffickers don't go for people who have a lot of social power because their dads come after you.
- [45:13]
A
Yeah, right. Liam Neeson is there and just what you're saying there as well. But like it's often sex workers that get sex trafficked. The whole this whole like virginal myth thing, it negates all of that. And I don't know if you've seen that, the latest Louis Theroux documentary on the manosphere, but there was a part of it that made me go, hang on, what was that? What was that? One of the people being interviewed in it mentioned that he has a company that manages the girls on OnlyFans and that not much more was said about it. But I was like, what, what is, is that thing that's happening now that there are management firms out there that manage girls in OnlyFans? They don't need managers. That's what OnlyFans is.
- [45:53]
B
Could be, yeah.
- [45:54]
A
What is that?
- [45:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, some of it is fosta sesta and other laws.
- [45:59]
A
Can you explain what that is just to anyone listening?
- [46:01]
B
It's a series of ostensible anti trafficking laws that affect both like kind of real life and digital life, that ultimately the biggest sort of effect that they've had is preventing sex workers from earning money legitimately. They often have, you know, their credit cards locked. They. So it's just another example and you see this in the Victorian and Edwardian period too. Laws. The older I am, the less likely I am the less I want to say, you know, they were good intentioned, because I'm not even sure they were good intentioned, but let's just say good. Like laws that were ostensibly passed to protect women actually end up having the inverse effect because they start making more aspects of sex work illegal. 1885 makes brothels illegal. And by brothels they mean two women who are working together. You know, when these sorts of laws fosta sesta or that brothel law from 100 years before come in, you know, and obviously all of the social conditions that mean that women turn to sex work in order to make ends meet or in order to get a lot of money, depending on, you know, where you are on that spectrum. None of those have gone away. But the law makes it more difficult turn to third parties. Right. That's why third parties get involved in commercial sacrifices sex. Because women need people to watch out for the cops. Women need people to pay off the cops. Sex workers need people to find them flats. They need people who are willing to rent them flats who are often going to be pretty dodgy because they're taking big risks because now it's illegal. And now they need digital managers because the digital space has become more and more locked down for independent sex workers.
- [47:46]
A
And that's what Sester and Foster is in the US isn't it? Is it basically makes advertising online illegal for sex workers.
- [47:53]
B
Yeah, yeah. And I don't know, I don't know enough about it, but that's that, you know, it, it has that it very familiar feel of anti trafficking, anti exploitation laws that are incredibly poorly written almost by design. So ultimately the main victims of those laws are the people who were invoked in order to pass the laws in the first place. Right. It's just the irony is so bitter and it's like 200 years old now.
- [48:23]
A
So as a final question then, what do you think that today we can learn from a story like Lydia Harvey's? Because it does sound like we are repeating the same patterns again and again and again, and times have changed. But when you look at these moral panics and you look at these laws being passed, you can see pretty quick we're going in circles here.
- [48:40]
B
Yeah. I think the very first thing that we need to learn from a story like Lydia Harvey's is that we cannot understand sexual labor or sex trafficking without understanding the full spectrum of labor. What, you know, we need to ask what other work is available to people who are being trafficked? You know, what is driving them into these sort of spaces of being vulnerable? What Perfectly legal exploitations. Did they suffer before they started suffering these illegal ones? And when you start asking those questions, you really start to understand the context under which, you know, people are being made victims of this. Lydia Hardy was working 80 hours a week for next to no pay, having to live with her employer. You know, it's not exactly rocket science that when a handsome man comes along and tells her how much money she could make, and you know, I think there was an inkling she was going to sell sex, but she didn't really know what that was. But of course she's going to jump at that. You know, anything is better than the job she was doing. So that's one thing we can learn. Another thing we can learn is that if we keep making laws that make the character of the victim their sort of central point, then this is always going to happen, right? That this idea of the perfect victim has to just has to get in the bin and that that applies to trafficking and it applies to rape and sexual assault. This is the thing that's making people get in the bin, go scot free and things not coming to trial. And finally, although Lydia is traveling before the age of passports and border control, is that borders make all of this worse. And I know it's extremely naive to advocate for open borders right now, but we at least have to acknowledge that cracking down on illegal migration also means allowing traffickers to exploit people.
- [50:36]
A
Julia, you have been marvellous to talk to once again. I knew that you would be. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
- [50:43]
B
They can find me on my staff site on Birkbeck. I have a really unique name, so just googling me actually is a really easy way to find me.
- [50:52]
A
That is true.
- [50:54]
B
And my book, the Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, I think is available in all forms. Mats from all great bookstores. Please buy from an independent bookstore, not from the perfectly legal exploiters.
- [51:05]
A
Thank you Julia, you have been magnificent as always.
- [51:09]
B
Thanks so much Kate. Your questions are excellent as always.
- [51:16]
A
Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Julia for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts come. Coming up, we are going inside the brothels of New Orleans, Paris, New York and India. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us@betwixtistoryhit.com this podcast was edited by Hannah Feodorov and produced by Sophie G The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, the history of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.