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Abolition and the ‘White Slave Trade’ in Interwar Egypt
Abstract
This paper will examine efforts to abolish the practice of legalized prostitution in Egypt immediately after World War 1, the 1920s, and early 1930s, with particular attention to the works of European benevolence societies whose raison d’etre was the so-called White Slave Trade. Prostitution had been legal in Egypt since the late 19th centuries and during the war had been subjected to emergency regulations made possible under the declaration of martial law in November 1914. Martial law was lifted in 1919, and, despite considerable public opposition, prostitution remained legal. A legal complication presented itself through the continuation of the complex series of extra-judicial privileges for European citizens known as the capitulations regime, which remained in place even after Egypt’s nominal independence in 1922. European prostitutes and souteneurs were of particular concern to Egyptian authorities as prosecution, conviction, and deportation of European nationals accused was nearly impossible under the capitulations. Hence, much of the work undertaken rested in the hands of private and non-governmental organizations, many of whom were concerned with the so-called White Slave Trade, through which unsuspecting young women were supposedly lured away from Europe only to find themselves trafficked abroad and forced to work as sex slaves via a worldwide criminal network extending from Gibraltar to Japan. Here, I follow the work of Jean-Michel Chaumont, who has documented the ways in which the League of Nations task force set up to investigate the white slave trade inadvertently (or, perhaps, somewhat deliberately) manufactured its existence through a series of leading questions and misleading reports. As part of its attempt to demonstrate its role as a newly independent nation, Egypt became a prominent member of the League of Nations task force on the White Slave Trade, belying its own internal struggle to maintain public order and establish effective control over legalized prostitution in its own major cities. This paper will examine how Egyptian authorities attempted to deal with questions of public order, public health, and the jurisdictional complications involved with sex work, and introduce some of the myriad individual and community actors—each with their own slightly different goal—who helped and hindered efforts to regulate and eventually abolish prostitution in the country.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries