The International Traffic in Women: Scandinavia and the League of Nations Inquiry of 1927

Abstract

During the 1920s, the League of Nations commissioned the first worldwide study of human trafficking. The study reveals a great deal about the role of the League in crime prevention during the inter-war period and development of human trafficking as an international threat. The official report of 1927 presented material from field visits to 28 countries across Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Americas, but not Scandinavia. The researchers used a definition of ‘traffic in women’ to suit the policy-making agenda, but when contemplating the situation in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden they realized they had laid a conceptual trap from which they could not escape. Although the League's research has been forgotten, the ‘Scandinavian dilemma’ continues to haunt the international response to human trafficking.

Keywords:

• Human trafficking
• International crime
• Traffic in women
• Transnational organized crime

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the staff at several libraries and archives for invaluable assistance in locating documents: The League of Nations Archives at the United Nations Library in Geneva; the Social Welfare History Archives at the Archives and Special Collections, Elmer Andersen Library, University of Minnesota; and the British Library, Document Supply Centre, in Yorkshire.

Notes

¹ I am using the words ‘international crime’ here, not in the current legal sense but in the historical sense. During the 1920s, the League of Nations, in conjunction with the International Criminal Police Commission, emphasized the ‘new class of criminal—the international criminal’ who made use of advances in communication and transportation to pursue organized forms of cross-border criminality: white slave trafficking, drug smuggling, professional criminality, and anarchist violence (see, generally, Deflem 2002; Knepper 2011).

² It would be assisted by assessors, or advisors, drawn from international voluntary organizations concerned with the traffic, including the International Bureau for the Suppression of the Traffic, the Jewish Association for Protection of Women and Girls, and the International Catholic Association for the Protection of Girls (League of Nations 1921:599).

³ The Bureau funded studies in juvenile delinquency, police problems, penology, and criminal justice administration, including development of UCR statistics (Rosen 1995) and criminology as a field of inquiry (Laub 2006).

⁴ The report found that public dance halls had a bad reputation in cities and towns across the country. ‘The stories of crime and debauchery which newspapers reported from time to time… revealed that they were frequently connected with saloons or so-called hotels which encouraged immorality on the part of dance-hall patrons and tolerated the presence of criminals’ (Gardner 1929:1).

⁵ Pierre Le Luc replaced Hennequin in 1926; Tadakatsu Suzuki sat in for Sugimura.

⁶ Curiously, one Ringverein was known as Apachenblut, ‘Apaches’ Blood' (Hartmann and von Lampe 2008:111).

⁷ This was what the reformers from English-speaking countries had already believed to be the case. In 1923, Johnson quoted Annie Baker of the International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Women: ‘Owing to rigorous action taken by the United States and Canada in relation to immigration, it can be fully assumed that those countries will not be the objective of traffickers. As in former days, their eyes will doubtless be directed to South American ports even more than to Egypt’ (Johnson 1923:204).

⁸ This also explains the decision to minimize Riga as a route of white slave traffic. Kinsie had turned up evidence to suggest Riga could have been defined a centre of the traffic, if not a third a ‘third route’, yet Snow and Johnson choose to overlook this. See Chaumont (2009:134–136).