36.
Title: [The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon]
Author: William Thomas Stead
Genre: Journalism, History, Victorian
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Victorian IS Reading
Date Completed: May 5, 2016
Rating: *****

In 1885, dissatisfied with the lack of protection afforded minors by the law, William Thomas Stead published a four-part work of investigative journalism, exposing the insidious world of child prostitution in London, and specifically the thriving market for virgins supplied through coercion, deceit, and frequently rape.  Often posing as a gentlemen in the market for a "maiden," Stead meets with brothel owners and introducers, follows the mistresses and their charges to midwives and doctors for certificates of virginity, and even manages private conversations with girls during which he tries, often unsuccessfully, to more fully explain their situations. Time and time again Stead secures the sale of these young women, for £5, £7, £10 pounds, and hears of patrons who brag of requiring so many virgins a fortnight, or having "ruined" over 3,000 girls in the course of his sexual career. As a body, and with no exception in his writing, Stead views these children and young women as victims of a malicious system that is unchecked by law and instead protected by a judicial system which favors the wealthy men who are its clientele. At a time when a child of thirteen can consent to sexual acts, despite her more common ignorance of sex , the law wholly protects the men who participate in what Stead calls "organized rape" (9). Even when raped, the victims of this industry have no recourse: "No one will believe for story, for when a woman is outraged,by fraud or force, her sworn testimony weighs nothing against the lightest word of the man who perpetrated the crimes" (34).

Stead's publications is both fascinating and heartbreaking. He exposes the machinations of the industry, and brings to light the various methods "introducers" and procuresses use to harvest young women for the commodity of their virginity, most often manipulating them into an arrangement which leaves the young girls ignorant of events to come, and later traps them in a web of prostitution from which very few are ever able to escape. Personal narratives humanize the subject, balancing Stead's observations with purportedly true accounts of women trapped in the industry, at times outright kidnapped, and even sold abroad to European and American brothels. The legal, gendered, and sexual problems that allow for the commercial system Stead so aptly vilifies are far from resolved; though the legal age of consent was eventually raised in the UK, child sexploitation and human trafficking persist, often relying on the same commodification of the young, often female, body, and a gendered system of dominance and abuse.  In this way, Stead's accounts are timeless, and serve as a strong historical primary source to understand a bit of a continually contemporary horror.


35.
Title: Student Papers
Length: Over 300 pages
Date Completed: May 3, 2016