Ravishers or Tradesmen? Understanding East European Traffickers at Home and Abroad

• In Event: Sex on the Move: Trafficking, Migration, and Public Scandals in the Early Twentieth-Century Polish Lands

Abstract

The migration of thousands of young women out of Eastern Europe in the early years of the twentieth century played into a worldwide panic about human trafficking that assumed a lack of agency on the part of migrating women. This paper re-assesses the migrant-trafficker relationship by looking at the position of migration brokers in communities across the Polish lands. It emphasizes the multiple functions migration agents filled, the ways imperial regulations helped create the need for mediators to aid migrants in crossing international borders, and the process by which local Polish elites and state actors alike often racialized the image of migration brokers by depicting them as amoral Jews. The paper argues that by sexualizing and racializing a relationship that may have been rooted primarily in economic exchange, contemporary observers and historians alike have overlooked deeper structural realities that help explain the flight of thousands of young women in this period, often through the aid of mediators.

Author

• Keely Stauter-Halsted, U of Illinois at Chicago