I dunno about Arab sultans and American/English women, but I recall hearing a story on NPR about very real sex slavery – I can’t remember if the women were from the former Yugoslavia or the former Soviet Union. Here’s some additional detail from an Eastern European women’s group that met to discuss the problem:
http://www.brama.com/issues/havrylenko.html
Also, I vaguely remember reading something about the filthy-rich Sultan of Brunei having a thing for American and European starlets, but I’m pretty sure all of that was consensual “sugar daddy” stuff, so more power to him.
Welcome to the SDMB, and thank you for posting your comment.
Please include a link to Cecil’s column if it’s on the straight dope web site. To include a link, it can be as simple as including the web page location in your post (make sure there is a space before and after the text of the URL).
While it may not have been a big deal in the 19th century, this Congressional Research Service Report describes human trafficking for prostitution and forced labor as
I was involved in production of a documentary/drama on trafficking to warn Ukrainian girls about the problem - how they are recruited as nannies, dancers, and housekeepers and find themselves working as strippers and prostitutes without papers or means to escape. The filmmakers interviewed women who had escaped about their experiences - harrowing to say the least.
I appreciated reading your information that added much to Cecil’s sorry response to the original question. I had to reread Cecil’s column twice before I realized that I wasn’t just being cranky about a flippant article on FEMALE slavery [granted there might have/is some male sex slavery, but not to the numerical extent that women are exploited and abused]. Sex slavery is nothing short of human rights abuse.
Honestly, I expect a bit more from Cecil’s column whether it is written by himself or a staffer. Your editor[s] need to take a step back and look hard at an article from a larger perspective. This column basically told me that the concept of white slavery gained popularity during periods of constricted and conservative behavior for the general public at large. Excuse me, female slavery has existed for thousands of years. It exists today: women promised a bright future only to be smuggled into a foreign country, passports stripped away and they are forced into the sex trade. Russian and Eastern European women in Western Europe, young rural girls taken across borders into Thailand…these are the more well known images. Consider the real psychological, physical and social costs on each woman finding herself in this situation and then reflect on the fact that a growing number of 12 and 13 year olds are finding themselves here as well… Cecil’s column made the issue seem trivial.
On a considerably lighter note, a friend of mine actually had a brush with this. Her high school class had taken a trip to Spain, and she and a male friend were walking down the street in Madrid when an Arabic man approached them. He asked the young man how much money he wanted for my friend. What makes this sort of funny is that the guy had a notoriously zany sense of humor, and he told the Arab,“Oh, geez, that’s tough. She’s been in my family a long time, lots of sentimental value, yadda yadda.” She was ready to kill both of them. The Arab let it be, though.
magadalene - if you do want to make Cecil Adams aware of some of the comments on one of the Straight Dope columns, your best bet is probably to e-mail C K Dexter Haven and/or Ed Zotti (though Ed Zotti gets a lot of e-mail from what I here.)
…um, Pinky, I have heard that Arab men offer to “buy” attractive teenage tourists as a practical joke, knowing full well that no tourist group anywhere will sell its teenage guests. They have a good laugh about “freaking out the furriners” with their friends later.
And yeah, Theobroma is right - Pinky stumbled onto one of those “freak out the foreigner” tricks that probably dates back to the original 19th century hysteria.
The National Geographic September 2003 edition has a very informative article about Slavery in all it’s forms. Suprising(or not) the United State is 1 of the biggest offenders with Texas and Florida leading the way. Makes you wonder about our leaders, the GOP kind I mean.
Never mind that Texas and Florida are both states with large immigrant populations. California’s probably high on that list also, but since they have a Democratic governor (at the moment, at least), they get a pass?
Is the NG article available online? Can you provide a link?
DISPOSABLE PEOPLE, by Kevin Bales. An exhaustively comprehensive book about the slave trade in the world around the turn of the 21st century, as up to date as you’re likely to find.
Available through Amazon. Not a dull page in it. NOT recommended for light reading or entertainment.
The notion of prostitutes being traded as slaves across state borders was exaggerated quite a bit in the early 20th century by politicians looking to advance certain regulations. The hub-bub centered around prostitution houses along state borders, as this was where it was supposed most trafficking was going on.
As I recall, there resulted some sort of federal law exacting punishment for crossing state borders with the intention of committing an act there that would be criminal in the home state. In this case, it appears that the disturbing notion of white sex slavery was raised to satisfy other motives. The law passed to stop such trafficking was applied broadly, and used to stop people from getting divorces/abortions in a neighboring state, and to stop people from crossing the border to avail themselves of a neighboring state’s less restrictive alcohol laws.
Not to say that real “white slavery” doesn’t occur, even in the US. It certainly does, and you have cites to show it. The only reading I ever did myself on the subject was a sensationalistic “true crime” genre book entitled Slave Girls, which focused almost entirely on the use of imported slave labor for menial household chores, basically slave maids (the modern-day equivalent of the 19th century scams they used to run to get European immigrants into the country before forcing them into sweat shops – except that today it would be Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East that prove the most fertile ground for such exploitation.)
BTW, directed at the_card_whale… trying to bring President Bush and his brother into this and somehow blame them is just silly partisan jingo not even worthy of an angst-filled anarchist teenager, and ought to be confined to the Pit. In the other forums, we have a higher standard than just “blah blah, Bush, corporate America, therefore evil, blah blah.”
Oops, should read more closely next time. Cecil mentions the act I was thinking of, the Mann Act. That’s the one I was thinking of, that was abused to prosecute a broader variety of crime during the 20’s.
Where have you heard that Arab men who meet people - not tourist groups but people on the street as in
would find it amusing to pretend they were going to commit a crime? Why do we not hear of black men who think it’s funny to freak out store clerks by pretending they plan to rob the place?
I wonder how much of this is related to the severe social restrictions on women in the late Victorian age. Once a woman was ‘ruined’ she often had no choice but to become a prostitute, and the newspapers were full of that kind of thing. It was ridiculously easy to ‘ruin’ a woman. There’s a discussion of the phenominon—and some murder cases that resulted from it----in Ann Jones’ Women Who Kill. If you look in the footnotes, you’ll find the case of Edith Thompson, a young New York girl who was discovered to have been impregnated by a respectible friend of her father’s. Despite the fact that she was a bedridden individual, she was thrown out in the street. Beyond that, her fate is unknown. She was eleven.
The thing about ‘ruining’, though, was that the men doing it were supposedly nice, normal guys who firmly believed in the double standard. Most of the girls were working class, and had no legal recourse. People could talk about white slavery, but they didn’t want to discuss the son of the house molesting the maids, and threatening to dismiss them without a reference if they objected.
This ranks right beside the statement that “Whether or not to commit suicide is one of the most important choices a person can make” on the scale of sheer profundity. :rolleyes: