Historians, Criminologists and the Traffic in Women: Thinking about Historical Time

Abstract

Traffic in women presents a tremendous international issue in the twenty-first century just as it did in the nineteenth century. Except that looking back, historians have characterized the white slave trade as a Victorian Era fairy tale. But if women were never really kidnapped shipped to foreign lands and imprisoned in brothels, why do criminologists view human trafficking, including women smuggled across borders for sex work, as part of the globalization crime in the twenty-first century? The answer can be found in conceptions of singular and plural time.