Why did law enforcement and news reporters “forget” that girls and young women are sex trafficked from jails — a crime that has been going on for at least a hundred thirty years?
I asked myself that question when I stumbled over W.T. Stead’s article series in the Pall Mall Gazette while researching for my next Victorian vigilante thriller.
W.T Stead was an investigative journalist reporting on sex trafficking in Victorian Britain. He found that girls and young women are trafficked directly from prisons, and that law enforcement doesn’t care one bit.
They go into workhouses, to see what likely girls are to be had. They use servants’ registries. They haunt the doors of gaols when girls in for their first offence are turned adrift on the expiry of their sentences.
(…)
If a child of fourteen is cajoled or frightened, or overborne by anything short of direct force or the threat of immediate bodily harm, into however an unwilling acquiescence in an act the nature of which she most imperfectly apprehends, the law steps in to shield her violator. If permission is given, says “Stephen’s Digest of the Criminal Law,” the fact that it was obtained by fraud, or that the woman did not understand the nature of the act is immaterial.
The Pall Mall Gazette, 1885
They also mention that law enforcement shrugs it off.
Remember, we’re talking about vulnerable girls and women, most of them with a background of abuse, drug addiction, and poverty, and no place to go once they are released from jail. What would you do if you had nothing and no one you could ask for help, no money, no roof over your head, and then a pimp offers you a room, food, and drugs to forget your shitty life?
I struggled to understand why law enforcement isn’t interested in the fate of these girls and never has been. I tried not to file this under “No one gives a shit because they’ve already been labelled as prostitutes.”
So I dug a bit deeper and found this: NHI — No Human Involved, is an unofficial term used by law enforcement to describe murders of people in marginalised communities, including sex workers, sex trafficking victims, Indigenous peoples, and people of colour.
Looks like my initial assumption of “No one gives a shit because they’ve already been labelled as prostitutes” was correct. Now I just have to add “plus anyone who is not white and straight.”
