Natural/ National Difference in 1920s Anti-Trafficking Discourses

A common feature of colonial discourses was a spatialized narrative of historical progress, that characterized different parts of the world as representing fixed positions on a linear, hierarchical scale of social evolution. As historians of racial sciences have illustrated, a variety of allegedly natural differences between peoples made up the substance of this hierarchy. Among these allegedly natural differences was the variation in the age of puberty across regions. My presentation analyzes this particular thematic, using the context of debates at the League of Nations conferences on suppressing trafficking. In the early 1920s, representatives of the League's member countries deliberated on whether to set down a universal age of sexual consent, which would be a common age standard below which all women/girls in prostitution could be considered ‘trafficked.' Some representatives marshaled climatological assertions about the varying ages of puberty across the world, which were a throwback to older theories of racial difference. I analyze these assertions in some depth, and demonstrate how they contributed to form an imperial spectacle that collated a hierarchy of nations, even as the League upheld principles of fraternity and community. I also reflect on the extent to which this classificatory system was accepted as commonsense, or contested, in wider anti-trafficking discourses.