From Anti-Trafficking to Anti-Prostitution: American Philanthropy at the League of Nations

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The international anti-trafficking framework emerged early in the 20th Century as the 'white slave traffic'. In the 1920s, the League of Nations appropriated that framework as the 'traffic in women and children'. Much as it is today, anti-trafficking, internationally, sought to address those who would traffic children, or traffic coerced women. However, in 1933, the result of American philanthropy within the League of Nations, the very meaning of 'trafficking' changed. This conceptual shift found in a new Convention criminalised those who facilitated the work or travel of consenting - prostitute - women.

While the United States never joined the League, US philanthropy turned on the taps, with millions flowing "early, permanent, and massive" to it. In 2024 terms, more than a hundred million US dollars of Rockefeller money was donated to the League; of which 5 million went to the only dog John Rockefeller, Jr. had in the fight: anti-prostitution.

Having been the Foreman of a 1910 Grand Jury in New York City examining commercial prostitution, Jr. then established the Bureau of Social Hygiene so as to continuously make "warfare against the forces of evil". Having funded studies on prostitution in New York and then, Europe; the League of Nations made the world his oyster.

This paper considers a committee of the League - chaired by the head of the Bureau - which was in the main 'abolitionist': advocating for the end of state-regulated prostitution by repealing such laws. And to that end, the committee often massaged the investigator's findings. Yet, while the committee was willing to deceive the general public through its 'popular' published report; when considering the 'evidence'-based part of the report, the non-American members of the committee came to recognise that those the Bureau had mis-led them: all with the same objective: to overstate the 'trade' in international prostitute women so as to make of it a new species of trafficking.