Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society The Victorian Sex Trafficking Panic About this episode Was there really a boom in sex trafficking at the end of the 19th century? What was 'white slavery'? And how often did the traffickers get caught?
Kate is joined by Dr Julia Laite for this episode. Julia is a historian at Birkbeck, University of London, and the author of 'The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey'.
This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.
You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK.
All music from Epidemic Sounds.
Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.
Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:35 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters! It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets, once again. I do have to actually give you quite a spicy fair dues warning today, because this is all about sex trafficking in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. So it's gonna be a bit of a rough ride. And if you don't want to listen to this one, then fair enough, you don't have to. Dig one out from the back catalogue and we'll see you next time. But for the rest of you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, other adults, about adulty things, and adulty ways of arranging subjects, and you've been adult too. Right, let's get on with it!
1:07 Kate Lister? Buenos Aires, at the Paris of the south of the early 20th century. People are speaking Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English, and a host of Eastern European languages. A young girl steps off the gangplank, boots squeezing her growing feet. She carries a small bag with her and hurries to keep up with her custodians, a married couple. She keeps her eyes on their back, trying not to get lost amongst the dockworkers and other arrivals. She's arrived in a whole new world, searching for a life outside of domestic work and a new opportunity for herself. But it's not gonna be all that she hoped for, not by a very long shot.
2:17 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. In 1910, a 16-year-old girl lands in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from her home in New Zealand. Her name was Lydia Harvey, and within a year, she would be in the custody of police officers on the other side of the world in London. Her story is just one of those many girls and women who were trafficked into sexual exploitation. Today, I'm joined by the wonderful Dr Julia Late, author of The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, to hear about sex trafficking in the early 1900s and why there was such a moral panic around it. Was it worse than it was before? Was it a new thing that was happening?
3:00 Kate Lister? Or was it just people were frightened that it was? And what would the experience have been like for the women that survived it? Right, are you ready to do this? I know I am.
3:19 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Julia Late, how are you doing?
3:25 Speaker 01 I'm grand, it's lovely to be back.
3:27 Kate Lister? Oh, thank you for coming back. I have so much fun talking to you about all things... I was going to say Victorian and sexual, but we're actually, we're into the Edwardians today, talking about the ever-perky topic, sex trafficking. Julia, how did you come to research this? What a subject to research, the history of sex trafficking.
3:47 Speaker 01 I found my way to the history of trafficking through the history of sexual labour more generally, right? So, my first book was about prostitution in London.
3:57 Speaker 01 And quite quickly, you start realizing that trafficking is a big part of that story. And then I got more and more interested in migration. And that they kind of come together in that topic. So yeah, that's that's how I came to it.
4:09 Kate Lister? There is a huge panic in the Victorian period, as you well know. But you can tell us a little bit about about why this explosion of moralizing concern erupts in the 19th century, which then feeds into the 20th century. What why why did they suddenly become so panicked about this?
4:28 Speaker 01 It's a really good question because, of course, you know, women have been subjected to sexual violence, you know, for a very long time. So what was new about this moment? And I think it's a little bit of like an actual reality changing and also a moral panic about what that changing reality means. So there's a kind of explosion in migration. This is a kind of migration revolution era, particularly for younger women. Women are leaving rural places to go to cities to work. They're leaving cities to go to other cities across oceans to work.
5:04 Kate Lister? Yep.
5:04 Speaker 01 Transportation is cheaper. The global job market is growing and women are off seeking like more opportunities for themselves.
5:12 Kate Lister? Okay.
5:13 Speaker 01 And that, of course, subjects them to more actual exploitation and violence and those sorts of things. But it also makes, you know, the patriarchy, to use a shorthand, incredibly nervous and anxious. Because women are no longer in the protected space of the home. Right there, they're going out, they're being unsupervised in dance halls and they're going to cinemas.
5:42 Kate Lister? Surely not.
5:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, right? Like, and and so the part of the worry is about their freedom. Right? And so there's this.
5:50 Kate Lister? Of course.
5:51 Speaker 01 It's a little bit of both because these, you know, when I talk about trafficking, I don't want to make it sound like, you know, this wasn't happening. Um, but at the same time, the way it was happening wasn't the way that they were panicking about.
6:06 Kate Lister? And there was a real panic. I mean, you get it. It starts in the 19th century. We've got all this moralizing with contagious diseases act. We have the great social evil. And then we have this thing that happens, the maiden tribute of modern Babylon. You have this expose about children being sold to rich men for sexual exploitation. And then this panic grips all of the papers and you get almost like this, I can't even remember the language being used, but it's like white slave trade, I think that you start seeing it then.
6:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I, it kind of starts a little bit earlier than the maiden tribute of modern Babylon.
6:39 Kate Lister? Okay.
6:40 Speaker 01 So in the late 1870s, and it comes right out of the contagious diseases acts. Those campaigners who were campaigning against the acts that subjected women to forcible confinement and forced inspection. If they were suspected of having a venereal disease, the people who were protesting that law started seeing it as part of the story of trafficking, right? So because the countries that had regulation in place, these forcible inspections. They were also the countries that had regulated brothels. And these spaces were, were, were seen as places where women were, were heavily exploited. And so that campaign started to campaign against what they started to call the trafficking women or white slavery.
7:25 Speaker 01 We'll come back to that extremely problematic term, I think. And so a bunch of sort of religious reformers and political reformers and early feminists got together. And started investigating the traffic between England and Belgium specifically.
7:42 Kate Lister? Why Belgium? What did they do?
7:44 Speaker 01 Belgium, because it was one of the places that had regulated brothels.
7:47 Kate Lister? Okay.
7:47 Speaker 01 And it was generally considered even worse than France in terms of sort of depravity and specifically police corruption. So in seventy nine, eighteen seventy nine, there was this big expose, which gave rise to a special commission in the House of Lords. And they came up with a new law, trying to make the very first law against trafficking. But they were having trouble passing it because one of the things it did is increase the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. And the MPs in Parliament were very upset about this because they worried that their sons would just accidentally mistake a thirteen year old for a woman who was of age and then accidentally come under this law albo who, right? So, you know, there was this-
8:32 Kate Lister? I'm laughing, but that's not funny. That's just, that's mad. Okay. You know, you can just ask.
8:37 Speaker 01 It's funny because it's true.
8:39 Kate Lister? It's funny because it's true. Yeah. It's just, oh, God. Okay.
8:44 Speaker 01 And that's where this kind of thing about these like overly free women come in because they said, oh, but you know, these girls are so precocious, right? You can't be trusted. They look so much older than they really are, et cetera, et cetera. And so it looked like the law wasn't going to get passed. And so then Josephine Butler and the Salvation Army went to William Stead, who was this muckraking journalist, a sensational reporter, who conducted this investigation.
9:11 Kate Lister? I think of him as like the Piers Morgan of the age. Like, he's into scandal, he's into like, he, he has this kind of righteous anger, but it's also kind of caught up with his own publicity machine as well.
9:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:25 Kate Lister? That's kind of how I see him.
9:26 Speaker 01 I think if I was going to be trapped on a boat, I would definitely pick William Stead. But I think there's definitely parallels to be drawn.
9:35 Kate Lister? And he died on a ship. He died on the Titanic. Random fact. I remember that.
9:39 Speaker 01 He went down with the Titanic. He was conducting the band. He stayed with the band as they laid their way down. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, that's meant to the story that, that we're telling here as well. We'll, we'll, we'll get to that maybe too.
9:52 Kate Lister? Okay.
9:52 Speaker 01 But yeah, so Stead, Stead conducts this investigation and part of the investigation, he buys a virgin, you know, just to prove-
10:00 Kate Lister? Problematic.
10:01 Speaker 01 Yeah. This is where it gets really problematic, you know? In campaigning against trafficking, William Stead and his colluders essentially become traffickers. They buy a girl, they forcibly inspect her for virginity, they transport her to France. And ultimately, one of the very first people who came under the new law that did get passed because of this newspaper scandal was William Stead. And he went to jail for it. So, you know, it's, it's very ironic, but he saw that as like- Well, first of all, a great bit of self-publicity.
10:32 Kate Lister? Yeah.
10:33 Speaker 01 But also a kind of self-murdering. Um, but the law that does come out of it, and this scandal is enormous. It is the biggest selling newspaper scandal of all time.
10:43 Kate Lister? Huge.
10:44 Speaker 01 Maybe Profumo tips it, but I'm not even sure. It's, it's, it's huge. It's international. People are like lining up outside of every major newspaper around the world to get their hands on a copy of this.
10:57 Kate Lister? And do you know, I, I studied it a little bit. And one of the weird ripple effects you get it is you get all these little local newspapers, like out in the sticks that are responding to it, that have their own white slave trade watch that they're desperately searching for like their own example. But it's like in the Cotswolds or like, you know, it's like somewhere in the arse end of Cumbria. And they're all like, they're like gathered with their pitchforks, like ready, waiting to find their own version. And then it kind of disappears after like two weeks. Like, yeah, we didn't find any, we didn't find any slave trades in, in, in the Kendal area.
11:28 Speaker 01 It's a classic moral panic, but of course there's always a suspicion. Cause in any one of these spaces, in the Cotswolds, in, you know, rural Wales, there are girls who quote unquote have disappeared. You know, they, but they haven't actually disappeared. They've just gotten on a train in search of a better life.
11:44 Kate Lister? Hmm.
11:45 Speaker 01 Um, they haven't actually been trafficked, but the presumption is something terrible must have happened to them.
11:50 Kate Lister? Must have happened.
11:51 Speaker 01 Whereas they might be just sort of living, living their best life, you know, hanging out in a Soho cafe.
11:56 Kate Lister? So we get this like real global, like this bomb drops about this, oh my God, there's a trade in, in virgins and in women and children. How does this, I mean, does it calm down as we get, as we get into the 20th century? Or does this kind of feed on itself and it becomes a bigger panic?
12:15 Speaker 01 I think it feeds on itself, like any moral panic, there's a bit of a cyclical, you know, like it falls out of the news cycle a little bit. But really from 1885, right up until 1912, which is the next kind of beat, I guess, in the story. There's little bits of white slavery, this, you know, trafficking that, peppering the press. It would be rare for a week or two to go by without some major newspaper covering some kind of story about white slavery.
12:44 Kate Lister? And what do they mean by that? Let's talk about that term, white slavery, as you said, very problematic, but what did they mean by that?
12:51 Speaker 01 They meant so many things, which is one of the reasons it's so hard to work with it as a historian. At its simplest, it was literally just a euphemism for prostitution. So some people used it interchangeably with prostitution. The people who who did that usually were implying that prostitution was inherently exploitative, but not all the time. Sometimes they were just using it as a synonym. That's probably less common than this idea that prostitution was a form of slavery for women.
13:23 Kate Lister? Yeah.
13:23 Speaker 01 And it is comes out of the fact that a lot of the people who start this campaign were inspired by the abolitionists, the the people who campaigned to end chattel slavery, and which they would have, you know, seen as black slavery. And so they decide through what what can only be be described as a sort of racist ignorance, that white slavery is a good term to describe this new form of slavery where women are being enslaved. But of course, we can already see problems with that, right? First of all, the vast majority of women who are being exploited in commercial sex are not white around the world. So let's just begin with that.
14:07 Speaker 01 And the other thing is that it was being used as sort of to to invoke a specter that was somehow worse than chattel slavery. Right? So, oh, this is this is even worse because it's white women who are who are being subjected to these harms, which was an erasure of black suffering, and also a total denial of the fact that black women under chattel slavery were subjected to incredible sexual exploitation.
14:36 Speaker 01 And so it just erases and erases and erases. It's such a deeply racist term. And yet it's the term that everyone uses.
14:44 Kate Lister? It's so problematic and it feeds into this legacy that we have that's still around today of the the virginal white woman who's under attack and under duress that was used unemployed. I mean, you've only got to look at the horrific history of lynching in America to see how that worked, the idea of, you know, we must save the white woman at all costs. It's doing that as well.
15:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. And it's no coincidence that this panic about trafficking and about white slavery specifically, that racialized panic is happening at the exact time that the world is discovering scientific racism, right? That they're inventing, I should say, scientific racism. And the idea that there's, you know, a risk of national or racial degeneration if your national stock gets polluted with bad blood.
15:33 Kate Lister? Oh, it's all sounding horribly familiar.
15:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, right? I mean, plus ça change, right? It's, it's very depressing to work on this.
15:40 Kate Lister? Hmm, it really is. Did they have any sense, like, because it's also very nebulous, this just white slavery. It doesn't really give you any idea other than race about who is being enslaved or who they think is doing the enslaving.
15:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's exactly it. They, I think you touched on it when you said about that whiteness also means purity or virginity or sexual purity. So the imagined victim of white slavery was a virgin girl, usually under the age of 18 or certainly under the age of 21. That was who the imagined victim. The imagined perpetrator was often racialized as Jewish. So there was an incredible panic about, that was rooted, profoundly rooted in the kind of regurgitation of antisemitism, again, that you see from the 1880s on as Jews are leaving Eastern Europe. And migrating to other parts of the world. So the Jewish man is seen as the trafficker,
16:39 Speaker 01 as the kind of oor figure of the trafficker. And you see that racialization in the imagery as well. So he was kind of the main person thought of as the trafficker. But the other kind of stereotypes would have been French men, Italian men, Belgian men, working class men overwhelmingly, because they were the ones who were working as pimps, souteneurs, and traffickers within these regulated brothel systems of continental Europe. So the perpetrator was racialized in all kinds of ways, but the victim was always an innocent white girl.
17:19 Kate Lister? It's the Victorians do that. I say the Victorians, but actually I think that we still do that, is they create this perfect victim. And you can find really stark examples of when like the victim narrative doesn't fit, like these supposed rescue societies that get set up to help all these terrible victims of sex trafficking. Then they have rules, but it's like, you know, you can't be an unrepentant prostitute, quote unquote, and you have to be like a first time offender and things like that. And it's just like, do you really want to help people? Like, what is going on here?
17:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, they didn't want anybody who they didn't see as reformable, right? And they didn't want anybody who might pollute the thoughts of the girls who were reformable. So overwhelmingly, these reform homes specialized in taking women under the age of majority, so under eighteen, under twenty. And those women were expected to perform, you know, their, their penitence, right? Their penitence. Even when it got less heavy handed, there was still this idea that you're being retrained. But the irony is, you're retraining them into the exact occupations that they left in the first place seeking better lives, right? So they're being taught how to do domestic service, and they're being made to work in laundries.
18:33 Speaker 01 And those are exactly the things that they were fleeing. And that's what ended them up in situations where they were, you know, they were at risk. They were vulnerable. They they became victims of sexual violence.
18:44 Kate Lister? It's all performative, isn't it? It's performative rescuing, really, that was going on here. This is a problematic question, and I don't mean to sound like a dickhead when I say this. But what I want to say is like, is it true? That's that's just, yeah, I've said that now that sounds clumsy. But like, was there any truth to any of this panic? Were women being trafficked? Were children being kidnapped? Was there reason for this? Or was this just a fear that fed on itself and infected far too many people?
19:16 Speaker 01 I think there absolutely were very real cases. I mean, my my book, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey demonstrates.
19:23 Kate Lister? We'll talk about her.
19:24 Speaker 01 One, but one of many. And I think, you know, living through the era of the Epstein files, like, we we have to be eyes wide open about the fact that there are actually highly organized cabals of very horrible people who are systematically abusing young women for the pleasures of the rich, right? And and I I know because I've seen similar cases. I've seen the echo of this down through the past. This had to have been happening. Unfortunately, those are also the people who are best at hiding what they're doing. And they are the people who are least likely to come under, you know, the the force of the law. They're the people who have the most money to pay off the cops.
20:08 Kate Lister? And they tend to target the the people who are least likely to be missed. That they're already outside of that perfect victim narrative, which makes it very difficult for them to even raise any concerns. That happens all the time. This idea that there's a pure virginal young girl from a well-to-do family who all of this stuff, it's like, that is a very narrowly defined version of events. And people that fall outside of that, how do they have their voices heard?
20:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's that's exactly the right question to ask. They they didn't ultimately, right? Because even if they did, that would fall down in court because the jury and the judge are expecting to see this perfect victim. And most cases of trafficking, you know, what was almost certainly not happening is that the Victorian moral panic, which was, you know, innocent young girl shows up at train station, gets stuck with hypodermic syringe and thrown into a taxi and then brought to a brothel where there's no doorknob so they can't get out, like that sort of stuff.
21:10 Kate Lister? By a Belgian Jewish man from eastern Romania.
21:14 Speaker 01 Exactly, like that, that was almost certainly pure fantasy or so rare, so very, very rare. Almost all cases of trafficking start with girls who are making decisions about their own lives, right? They've decided, yeah, I am going to go with this man to South America because I am, I'm sick of the life I'm living. I don't, I don't want to work 80 hours a week in domestic service to just be able to afford next to nothing. You know, this guy's promising me much more meaningful, better paid work, adventure on a steamship, nice clothes, you know, things that were completely beyond.
21:47 Kate Lister? Easy to be seduced by that.
21:48 Speaker 01 Yeah. And, and, and so, you know, girls would say, yeah, yeah, I'll come with you. Um, and according to the Victorians, and in fact, according to the law, that completely removed them from the status of victim, right? So they couldn't prosecute for trafficking if there was any evidence that she was, quote, and I'm quoting from that 1885 law, of known immoral character. So if you can prove that she's of known immoral character, the person who trafficked her did not traffic her at all.
22:18 Kate Lister? And of course, it completely obliterates the chances of any boys being trafficked, right? I mean, we saw that in the Cleveland Street scandal of the 1880s, where it was exposed that very rich men had been trafficking young post office boys for sexual favors. The whole thing got hushed up, shushed up, thrown out of court, nothing happened really about that one.
22:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. And if, in fact, it would, would have been kind of labor trafficking that would have been of more concern for boys. Um, but they take a while to figure out that this is all labor trafficking ultimately.
23:03 Kate Lister? Be back with Julia after this short break.
23:12 Kate Lister? Hello Betwixters, I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
23:53 Kate Lister? So tell me about Lydia Harvey then, because you wrote a whole book on her. Who was she?
23:58 Speaker 01 Lydia Harvey was a nobody, a nobody of a girl who grew up in a small town called Omuru in New Zealand, working as a domestic servant with a single mother and lots and lots of sisters. She eventually goes on to Wellington where she meets a man who calls himself Aldo Chellis. And he says, "If you come with me, you'll have nice dresses and you'll never want for anything, and you'll be really well paid, and like, here's my colleague Marie, look how fabulous she is, come with us." And Lydia agrees. And I found her eventually, the reason I know she existed at all is because I found her in a Metropolitan Police file from 1910,
24:42 Speaker 01 because she wound up at the end of the day in London.
24:44 Kate Lister? Wow.
24:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, and so it was a fairly thick file, and I decided to chase it to the ends of the earth to try to figure out, you know, where she came from and what happened afterwards, right? Because so many trafficking stories have the same anecdotal form, right? Innocent young girl about which we hear very little, has this terrible experience, oh, isn't it awful? And then she disappears, she just, you know, nobody really cares. And I wanted to know what happened to Lydia afterwards. And so she ends up in London, she ends up being the star witness in the trial against her traffickers, whose real names were Antonio Carvelli and Alexander de Nikotera.
25:26 Speaker 01 And then she's eventually repatriated back to New Zealand, where she does go on to live a life, and she falls in love, and she performs in the theatre. All of those sorts of things. She she has she she doesn't have a very long happy ending. But, you know, she sort of refuses to just sort of wither and die. She goes on and lives her life.
25:48 Kate Lister? What happened to Lydia then? Because she she meets a guy in New Zealand who promises her dresses and etc, etc. Um, I'm going to assume that that deal didn't work out for her. But what happened to her? Do we get a sense of that?
26:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, so she is bought a steamship ticket from New Zealand to, uh, well, first to Uruguay. And then that's where she meets her traffickers. So she actually travels alone on the steamship and meets her traffickers in Montevideo, and then they take a boat to Buenos Aires.
26:21 Kate Lister? How old is she at this point?
26:22 Speaker 01 She's seventeen years old.
26:24 Kate Lister? Oh.
26:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:25 Kate Lister? Lydia.
26:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, she's a very young woman, a girl, I guess is the better word. Um, and she's, her hair is dyed, she's given nice dresses. Antonio sets her up in, uh, illicit brothels. So Buenos Aires had a regulated prostitution system, but they also had an enormous clandestine kind of shadow economy as well. And she becomes part of that, soliciting in a casino, taking men who she described as old, dirty, and very horrible um, back to these, this flat, forced to perform, uh, oral sex on them, which she hated. That was the main form of sex in Buenos Aires for prostitution. She considered it like a really big taboo and really hated it.
27:09 Speaker 01 And then eventually she catches, uh, venereal disease, which is what it was called at the time, an STI, we'd call it now. And they, the cops get close to figuring out what's going on. So Antonio shoves her on another steamship, locks her in the cabin. So she's there suffering from an STI, two STIs actually, locked in the cabin of a steamship across the Atlantic. Finally ends up in London, where she's put back out on the streets to work. And that's when the cops find her.
27:38 Kate Lister? Oh, Lydia. So and what mechanism is being used to force her to work? Are they are they violent? Do they? I don't know if they had passports actually in at this period is like, what is the mechanism that they use? I mean, she's all on her own. Where where's she gonna go? Who's she gonna talk to?
27:53 Speaker 01 Part of it is just the sheer isolation and just, you know, the the fact she doesn't speak the language. She she may not even fully know where she where exactly in the world she's ended up. She has no money of her own. And another part is that they keep telling her, you know, if you go to the police, they're gonna tell your mother, they're gonna tell your sisters, your family, everyone's gonna find out what it is you've been up to. So it's shame that they're using to keep her in her place. And finally, it's charm. So grooming is a really big part of this. Um, that kind of lover boy method, which is a common thing that happens where, you know, she's been convinced that these people are her friends, that they love her and care for her.
28:35 Speaker 01 And, you know, those three sort of forces come together, the isolation, the shame and and that kind of friendship.
28:43 Kate Lister? It's funny how little it actually changes throughout history. That method is still incredibly common in sex trafficking today, right?
28:51 Speaker 01 Yeah. And and massively worsened by the fact that, yeah, we do have passports now. Our borders are much, much more more carceral and heavily policed than than they were in Lydia's time. So now people who are trafficked are subjected to a fourth threat, which is, we've got your, you don't have papers, right? What are you? If if you go to the cops, what's gonna happen? You're gonna get deported. You're gonna get deported back to a a place that was so horrible that anything felt better than than having to stay there. I either because of the sort of geopolitical situation or because of the abject poverty that somebody was living under or because of their their terrible home life.
29:32 Speaker 01 Um, you know, people run for all kinds of reasons and unfortunately there are traffickers who take advantage of that. And and they use the fact that, you know, migration restrictions are so intense now to keep people imprisoned.
29:47 Kate Lister? What were Lydia's family doing? Just, did they report her missing? Did they notice that she was missing?
29:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, so her mum, Emily Badley, went to the cops as soon as she sort of clocked that. So at first Lydia said, you know, don't worry mum, I'm going with a sheep farmer, I believe it was. I'm going to be their nursemaid. So they've got young children, they're going to South America and I'm going to travel as their nursemaid. Which is an incredibly believable story. Lots of young women would have done exactly that. But eventually Emily Badley realised that, you know, things weren't adding up and started seeking out her missing daughter. And did get, did get an investigation going. But then the Wellington Police were basically just telling her, you know, she was a no good nick.
30:36 Speaker 01 Who got involved with bad characters, you know, she was already of known immoral character, et cetera, et cetera.
30:42 Kate Lister? How did the police treat Lydia? I mean, now there's been lots of, hopefully lots of changes in how police treat victims of these kind of crimes. But we don't even have to go back that far and it's a very different picture.
30:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I, I find it really hard, right? Because the police are the ones writing this all down. So they get to decide how they look.
31:01 Kate Lister? Ah, yeah, of course.
31:03 Speaker 01 But I do, with all that being said, so there's, there's, the officer in charge of the case, Ernest Anderson. Actually, he does seem like a decent person. He does seem like, he gets very, very cross when the government says they're not going to pay for Lydia Harvey's travel back to New Zealand to her family. And he actually spearheads a fundraising effort to get her the money to get her home. So, you know, there's, there's a degree to which I feel like he cared. His colleague, who was working under him, P C Mead, on the other hand, four years later goes down for kind of extortion and bribery because of the way he was treating women who sold sex in London.
31:47 Speaker 01 So, you know, even within one case, we see the whole spectrum of, of police behaviour. But another person was, was in this story, whose name was Ailie McDougall. And she was in charge of taking the witness statements of girls who had been sexually assaulted or who were victims of trafficking. And she, even with her kind of Victorian morality hanging on her, nonetheless was an enormous advocate for victims. Um, she helped craft statements to try to secure convictions. She was very much on the side of the girls. Um, unlike some early women police officers who were definitely not on the side of the girls.
32:27 Speaker 01 Um, and so, yeah, it's, it's a really complicated story. Um, some things were perhaps a little better back then because there was an Ailey McDougal. Um, but, yeah.
32:37 Kate Lister? What happens to the traffickers?
32:40 Speaker 01 Oh, the traffickers. So they don't get very long in prison. Um, they, yeah. Surprise, surprise. They, uh, they don't get long in prison at all. I think they get six months without hard labor. Because, um, all of the girls involved in the case, because they also trafficked three French girls. But all of them were of varying degrees already of a known immoral character. And so they couldn't get them on the worst charge. And they knew that the case was going to fall down because their victims were so deeply imperfect. Um, and so they made a plea deal. And that's what they got. So the, the, the, the case never actually went fully to trial because there was, there was a plea bargain.
33:24 Speaker 01 Um, and so after six months, they're deported. Um, I don't know as much about Alexander de Nikotara after this. I didn't follow him quite as closely. Antonio Cravelli ends up, um, through a long, long convoluted story, uh, back in Australia with his wife Marie, his co-trafficker. Um, who was never found by the police, by the way. Um, and eventually is caught. This is one of these truth is stranger than fiction things. He's caught running a dance hall in Hobart, Tasmania. And the reason he's caught is because somebody recognizes him from his trafficking days in the early 20th century out in Western Australia. And they recognize him because
34:09 Speaker 01 he has one brown eye and one blue eye.
34:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that's how they catch him. And then he's deported for good and eventually dies somewhere in Italy in the nineteen thirties.
34:22 Kate Lister? When do laws start to change around trafficking? I'm hoping that we don't still have it on the books that you have to be a known good character in order to get a conviction.
34:31 Speaker 01 I mean, we don't have that still in the books. Like, it's not actually in statutory law anymore. That got changed in the nineteen fifty six Sexual Offences Act. And then there's been several other attempts to sort of define trafficking legally since. But I think we both know that the character of the victim is of utmost importance in any trial to do with sexual assault and violence and sexual exploitation. And, you know, if you speak to to social workers and, you know, solicitors, barristers now, they'll all say cases fall down when the victimhood isn't perfect enough, right? And and and it's almost always the case that a person who's been trafficked for sex,
35:15 Speaker 01 sex work has already been engaged in sex work.
35:17 Kate Lister? Yeah.
35:18 Speaker 01 Um, and there's still, despite everything, a pervasive belief that, you know, engaging in sex work therefore negates all of your other human rights. And and that's still unfortunately still happening. And that's even for cases that come to trial. The vast majority don't because even when women, I'm saying women actually, but it's not just, it's not just women, when people are in incredibly exploitative situations because of trafficking, they're still choosing to stay in them because they know that the, you know, the prize for coming forward is, first of all, potential threats to their life, and second of all, deportation. And once they're deported, they're going back to a place where their life is quite likely forfeit.
36:04 Kate Lister? What happens to Lydia? Is she okay when she gets back to New Zealand?
36:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, through all of my work, I try not to kind of imagine the inner world of the people I'm writing about because, you know, I don't know.
36:17 Kate Lister? Yeah.
36:17 Speaker 01 So I don't know what trauma she held. I don't know, you know, how she coped with her experience. I don't know if she told anyone. Um, other than her very close family who would have had to have known. Um, but uh, she ends up in Australia. She joins a theater troupe. And she ends up in Australia. I think she's a dancer in a theater troupe for a number of years, kind of doing the kind of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Hobart circuit. In fact, she may have ended up in Hobart at the same time as Antonio Curbelli, for all I know. Um, and she meets uh, a uh, the first mate of a ship. A man named Herbert Ockenden and they fall in love and they get married. Um, and here's a spoiler alert for anyone who wants to read the book.
37:03 Speaker 01 Um, she then goes on to live in um, Newcastle in Australia. Where she contracts the Spanish flu, the nineteen eighteen influenza.
37:15 Kate Lister? Oh.
37:16 Speaker 01 And so she dies a very young woman. Her husband dies just six months after her. Um, but before he dies, he erects a gravestone for her that's in the shape of a heart. And you can still see it um, in the cemetery in Newcastle.
37:42 Kate Lister? Be back with Julia after this short break.
37:50 Speaker 02 Hi there, I'm Dan, host of Dan Snow's History Podcast. And I can imagine on these dark winter nights, all you're gonna do is curl up with a cup of tea and get lost in an amazing story. Well, I can help you with that. Twice a week, I tell you the most dramatic and extraordinary stories from history with details I can guarantee you've never heard before. Feel the frostbite of that grisly failed American invasion of Canada in the dead of winter. Imagine every clash and blow at the Battle of Bosworth. Follow Eleanor of Accretaine, one of the most powerful women in the medieval world, as she goes on crusade to the Holy Land with 300 handmaidens in tow. She leads her own army. Everyone goes gaga for Eleanor.
38:32 Speaker 02 And trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores. For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Senor's History.
38:58 Kate Lister? How common were cases like Lydia's? Maybe, I don't know, maybe we don't even have the data to be able to answer a question like that. But the fact that it even came to court, the fact that these people were convicted, you know, crap sentence, but they were. And as you said, how many countless others weren't. How typical is this case?
39:17 Speaker 01 I think it's fairly typical in the sort of pattern of most of the other victims of Antonio Cravelli. So the three French girls who had all already worked in sex work in one way or another, you know, as part of the makeshift economy of their lives, right? So seamstresses, when there was seamstress work, on dairymaids, sex workers, you know, moving in and out of that. And that's a really typical pattern for anyone who migrates for sexual labour, under whatever coercive or non-coercive conditions. The degree to which this is organised and the way that they're going after Lydia as
39:57 Speaker 01 a particularly naive young woman does kind of strike me as a little bit rarer, just because I think most people who were third parties in the sex industry would have seen girls like Lydia as more trouble than they were worth. Um, you know, they would have preferred somebody who was more experienced to was kind of going into sex work with eyes wide open um and and that sort of thing. So I'm not, I'm not really sure how typical. And you're right, the dark figure is enormous because the vast majority of these cases never see the light of day.
40:32 Kate Lister? So I'm just thinking when you say that about how like the fear of this, the fear of white slavery can be all encompassing and it actually it actually prevents people getting real convictions. And I'm thinking what you're saying there about how that's not really how trafficking works. They don't tend to go for the well to do young virgin because they are high risk victims. And that every once in a while in a Facebook group, some mad person says that, oh, I came out today in the supermarket and there was a can in front of my car and everyone needs to be careful because that's how sex traffickers find their victims. And I'd look at stuff and I'm like, no, they don't.
41:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:12 Kate Lister? That's you mad person. That's not how this works at all.
41:16 Speaker 01 Not in the slightest. They find their victims in working class neighborhoods that are filled with people looking for better lives.
41:22 Kate Lister? That's right. And since time immemorial, they are not, well, I mean, I don't want to say like, these things never happen, but the chances of them grabbing somebody outside of Aldi because somebody left a chalk mark on the floor. But isn't it interesting that hysteria is still with us about this?
41:38 Speaker 01 Very much so. And I mean, and and people like the the news media dying out on it, they absolutely love it. It's this kind of formulaic, like sick circular cyclical retelling. Um, and of course, the the taken films with Liam Neeson have a lot to answer for in renewing that kind of ending.
41:57 Kate Lister? I mean, that that was the perfect victim, wasn't it? That was the perfect, straight from a Victorian sensation magazine, that one.
42:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. They really like they obviously, well, maybe they didn't do their homework. Maybe this is just like this is this sort of trope has been in circulation for so long that filmmakers just need to like pluck it out of the air in order to do it. But it really like that movie actually exemplifies exactly why traffickers don't go for people who have a lot of social power. Um, because their dads come after you.
42:27 Kate Lister? Yeah, right. Liam Neeson is there. And just what you're saying there as well, but like it's often sex workers that get sex trafficked. The whole, this whole like virginal myth thing, it negates all of that. And I don't know if you've seen that, the latest Louis Theroux documentary on the manosphere. But there was a part of it that made me go, hang on, what was that? What was that? One of the people being interviewed in it mentioned that he has a company that manages the girls on OnlyFans. And that not much more was said about it, but I was like, what, what is, is that thing? That's happening now that there are management firms out there that manage girls in OnlyFans? They don't need managers. That's what OnlyFans is.
43:07 Speaker 01 Would be, yeah.
43:08 Kate Lister? What is that?
43:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, some of it is fausta sesta and other laws.
43:13 Kate Lister? Can you explain what that is, just to anyone listening?
43:16 Speaker 01 There, it's a series of anti- obstensible anti-trafficking laws that affect both like kind of real life and digital life. That ultimately, the, the biggest sort of effect that they've had is preventing sex workers from earning money legitimately. They often have, you know, their, their, their, their credit cards locked. They, so it's just another example. And you see this in the Victorian and Edwardian period too. Laws, the, the older I am, the less likely I am, the less I want to say, you know, they were good intentioned. Because I'm not even sure they were good intentioned.
43:50 Kate Lister? Yeah.
43:50 Speaker 01 But let's just say, good, like laws that were ostensibly passed to protect women actually end up having the inverse effect. Because they start making more aspects of sex work illegal. Eighteen eighty-five makes brothels illegal, and by brothels, they mean two women who are working together. You know, when, when these sorts of laws, fausta sesta, or that brothel law from a hundred years before, come in.
44:16 Speaker 01 You know, and obviously all of the social conditions that mean that women turn to sex work in order to make ends meet, or in order to get a lot of money, depending on, you know, where you are on that spectrum. Um, none of those have gone away, but the law makes it more difficult.
44:31 Kate Lister? Yeah.
44:32 Speaker 01 To turn to third parties, right? That's why third parties get involved in commercial sex. Because women need people to watch out for the cops. Women need people to pay off the cops. Um, sex workers need people to find them flats. They need people who are willing to rent them flats, who are often going to be pretty dodgy because they're taking big risks because now it's illegal. And now they need digital managers because the digital space has become more and more locked down for independent sex workers.
45:01 Kate Lister? And that's what Sester and Foster is in the US, isn't it? Is it basically makes advertising online illegal for sex workers?
45:07 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah, and I don't, I don't know, I don't know enough about it, but that's, that, you know, it, it has that, it very familiar feel of.
45:16 Kate Lister? It does, doesn't it?
45:17 Speaker 01 You know, anti-trafficking, anti-exploitation laws that are incredibly poorly written, almost by design. So ultimately, the main victims of those laws are the people who were invoked in order to pass the laws in the first place, right? It's just, the irony is so bitter. Um, and it's like 200 years old now.
45:37 Kate Lister? So as a final question then, what do you think that today we can learn from a story like Lydia Harvey's? Because it, it does sound like we are repeating the same patterns again and again and again. And times have changed, but when you look at these moral panics and you look at these laws being passed, you can see pretty quick, we're going in circles here.
45:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think the very first thing that we need to learn from a story like Lydia Harvey's is that we cannot understand sexual labor or sex trafficking without understanding the full spectrum of labor. What, you know, we need to ask what other work is available to people who are being trafficked? You know, what is driving them into these sort of spaces of being vulnerable? What perfectly legal exploitations did they suffer before they started suffering these illegal ones? And when you start asking those questions, you really start to understand the context under which, you know, people are being made victims of this. Lydia Harvey was working eighty hours a week for next to no pay, having to live with her employer.
46:40 Speaker 01 You know, it's not exactly rocket science that when a handsome man comes along and tells her how much money she could make. And, you know, I think there was an inkling she was gonna sell sex, but she didn't really know what that was. But of course, she's gonna jump at that. You know, anything is better than the job she was doing. So that's one thing we can learn. Another thing we can learn is that if we keep making laws that make the character of the victim their sort of central point, then this is always gonna happen, right? That this idea of the perfect victim has to, just has to get in the bin. And that, that applies to trafficking and it applies to rape and sexual assault. This is the thing that's making people get go-stop free and things not coming to trial.
47:24 Speaker 01 And finally, although Lydia is traveling before the age of passports and border control, is that, you know, borders make all of this worse. And I know it's extremely naive to advocate for open borders right now, but we at least have to acknowledge that, you know, cracking down on illegal migration also means allowing traffickers to exploit people.
47:50 Kate Lister? Julia, you have been marvelous to talk to once again. I knew that you would be. And if people wanna know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
47:58 Speaker 01 They can find me on my staff site on Burke Beck. I have a really unique name, so just Googling me, actually, is a really easy way to find me.
48:06 Kate Lister? That is true.
48:08 Speaker 01 And my book, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, I think, is available in all formats from all great bookstores. Please buy from an independent bookstore, not from the perfectly legal exploiters.
48:19 Kate Lister? Thank you, Julia. You have been magnificent, as always.
48:23 Speaker 01 Thanks so much, Kate. Your questions are excellent, as always.
48:30 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Julia for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we are going inside the brothels of New Orleans, Paris, New York and India. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Hannah Fyodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt and Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
Previous The Truth about Charlie Chaplin Next Inside the Brothels of New Orleans Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated