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Narratives of Sexual Consent and Coercion: Forced Prostitution Trials in Progressive-Era New York City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Brian Donovan  and
Tori Barnes-Brus
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Abstract

This article analyzes testimony about forced prostitution voiced in New York City's Court of General Sessions from 1908 to 1915. During these years, the problem of coercive prostitution—commonly called “white slavery”—received an unprecedented amount of attention from journalists, politicians, and antivice activists. Drawing from verbatim transcripts of compulsory-prostitution trials, our research examines the relationship between cultural narratives and courtroom storytelling. We show how the white slavery narrative in popular culture oriented prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and jurors in prostitution trials. Extending the account of social control in the sociological literature on antivice activism, our analysis shows that the prosecution of forced prostitution was not simply a top-down exercise of juridical power. Using insights from conversation analysis and cultural history, an examination of compulsory-prostitution cases reveals a quadripartite storytelling process where judges and jurors—with different orientations to the white slavery narrative—played a constitutive role in how the defense and prosecution argued their cases.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , Summer 2011 , pp. 597 - 619
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2011 

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Cases Cited

Caminetti v. United States, 242 U.S. 470 (1917). The trial transcripts and case information of the following New York cases cited and discussed in this article are found in the Trial Transcripts of the County of New York, Court of General Sessions, 1883–1927, held in the Special Collections of the Lloyd Sealy Library at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, also found online at http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/crimeinny/trials/. The cases are identified below by the trial transcript number with which they are classified in the John Jay collection.Google Scholar
People v. Nicolo Barone, (1915), #2052.Google Scholar
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People v. Charles Dix, (1914), #1922.Google Scholar
People v. Charles Dix, (1914), #1935.Google Scholar
People v. Paul Drenka, (1910), #1093.Google Scholar
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Statutes Cited

Mann Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2421 et seq.Google Scholar
N.Y. Penal Law § 2460 (1907).Google Scholar