The white slavery narrative operated on the assumption that a true victim would never consent to go with a trafficker. But the reality was messier. The jobs available to working-class women were precarious, poorly paid and humiliating – it wasn’t difficult for slavers to present prostitution as an attractive alternative, especially since the first step was usually to seduce the woman and promise her love and adventure.
The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice by Julia Laite. In her witness statement, Lydia Harvey said that until she met Antonio Carvelli and Veronique White, she had been respectable: ‘I [had] never done that sort of thing for money or presents before meeting the Cellises and I regret that I ever met them.’ The idea of a woman’s ‘respectability’ – or her lack of it – was at the heart of panicked narratives about the ‘white slave trade’, fictional and factual.