Word: terrot
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...stories about the "white slave" trade, but it actually happened innumerable times in the vociferously moralistic setting of Victorian England. The nature, extent and eventual destruction of the white slave trade in England are described in detail in this modest monograph by a British novelist, Charles (The Neon Rainbow) Terrot. Between mild beige covers, in mild beige prose, he has told a story that makes the ghastliest passages of Dickens read like a parish calendar...
...Consent. White slavery, says Author Terrot, was no problem in Britain before the 19th century. The French started the trouble. In 1804 the Code Napoléon, a writ that ran through Western Europe, raised the age of consent to 21, and any man who had sexual relations with a minor could be brought to trial (penalty: two years' imprisonment). Suddenly the Continental whoremongers found it convenient to get their fresh recruits from foreign fields, notably England, where, as Author Terrot puts it, "any child of twelve was legally competent to consent to her own seduction." (Exception...
Ladies & Gentlemen. Under these favorable conditions, says Author Terrot, white-slave traders managed every year to beguile or betray thousands of young English women into lives of commercial vice. Their methods of recruiting were many and ingenious. The proprietors of the padding kens were on the payroll, as were the managers of "baby farms." Procurers worked hand in glove with society dressmakers, who sent hundreds of girls from the sweatshops to the knocking-shops. The flesh merchants also posed as theatrical agents. One of them, a rogue named Klyberg, assured stagestruck beauties that in Brussels they would "become actresses . . . ladies...
Crash Programs. Human contraband, says Author Terrot, was appallingly easy to smuggle out of the country. Small children were frequently doped and shipped across in coffins provided with air holes. Many of the teen-age victims, believing themselves bound for a pleasant position on the Continent, went willingly. The unwilling victim was first "broken in" at the London clearinghouse, where she was brainwashed by a covin of resident witches who subjected her to a crash program of sex education. If she did not cooperate, she did not eat. Then, auctioned off in Brussels or Antwerp, then the chief centers...
...could Britain, which had abolished slavery half a century earlier, permit it to continue in this form? For one reason, the subject was "too horrible to mention" in polite Victorian society, says Author Terrot. "The very horror of the crime," wrote a London editor, "was the chief seat of its persistence." After one reform bill was "talked out" of Parliament in the spring of 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette's W. T. (for William Thomas) Stead, a brilliant crusading journalist, published a four-part study entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon that stunned the nation and appalled...