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Across the Mediterranean: The Migration of Women for Prostitution, 1920-1939
Abstract by Dr. Liat Kozma On Session 039  (Vice in the Modern Middle East)

On Friday, December 2 at 8:30 am

2011 Annual Meeting

Abstract
The League of Nations' Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children received annual reports from its member states and their colonial or mandatory possessions. In 1924/5 and 1931/2, two traveling commissions visited dozens of cities around the world and mapped the movement of women for prostitution, and states' policies to curtail it. Indeed, the abduction of unsuspecting girls for prostitution was marginal to the Committee's deliberations, which came to discuss and explore the migration of prostitutes across national borders, and travels of pimps who facilitated such migration. Those "undesirables", and states' ability to protect themselves from them, became the focus of discussion and exploration. The proposed paper examines the Committee's reports from the Middle East and North Africa, and traces patterns of movement of pimps and prostitutes, within, to and from the region. It also examines measures taken by states and colonial or mandatory powers to restrict and control this movement; and then the creative means which those "undesirables" had devised to smuggle themselves to and from Istanbul, Beirut, Alexandria, Port Said, Tangier and more. I take the entire region, rather than individual countries, as my unit of analysis in order to examine new ways in which national borders and border crossing were being conceived of, maintained and challenged. I also examine here how interwar global processes affected life choices of prostitutes and pimps across the Mediterranean and beyond.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
None