The Black Slave trade and the White Slave Trade: The Same Battle?
The article questions the legitimacy of using the word "trade" to define the "white slave trade," which was referred to as "the slave trade in women and children" in 1921 and "the slave trade in human beings" in 1949. In actual fact, the Negro slave trade was characterized by two factors absent in the phenomena unduly associated with it: it was legal (which deprived its victims of any recourse from the authorities) and it was a compulsory process from start to finish ("capture", transport, sale and slave labor). In the absence of these two factors, it was only because of ill-chosen wording or factual distortions that the analogy was reinforced for over a century. In conclusion, the authors examine how, why and with what consequences certain contemporary writers nonetheless continue to use this terminology.