Those who initiated the struggle against white slavery in Europe and America were mainly women. All these struggles have led to significant anti-trafficking legislation during that time. It was also a result of the growing poverty of European women in the age of industrialization that continued in the next century.
Large European cities such as Paris and London housed thousands of prostitutes and governments did nothing to contain the problem, contenting themselves with preserving public order and ordering medical inspections to reduce the risk of venereal disease.
The women had to undergo medical examinations and register as prostitutes, while the men who were consumers of their sexual services were not required to undergo any examinations and were immune to legal prosecution. The enormous spread of prostitution in Europe, and specifically its transformation into an international trade over the second half of the nineteenth century, can be attributed to several factors, including:.
The public panicked when newspapers reported kidnappings of women and wrote of young girls who were forced into prostitution under false pretenses and taken to brothels in distant countries. Committees and international meetings were held in various places in the world to place the subject on the public agenda and seek ways of combating the phenomenon.
The silence was broken for the first time in England by Josephine Butler — , the daughter of an Anglican abolitionist minister, who beginning in led a campaign against the regulation of prostitution, which she deemed immoral. Believing that the government should concern itself with the social and economic causes of prostitution, Butler founded the Ladies National Association LNA and the International Abolitionist Federation to fight prostitution in The first measure to be adopted was the Criminal Law Amendment Act CLAA of , which gave a definition of a trafficked girl: an involuntary prostitute.
