Category: Prostitution Panics

• The "White Slavery" Film Panic

  This theory held that motion pictures about “white slavery” were not merely sensational dramas or warnings, but functional recruiting tools for prostitution rings. It emerged during the peak of the Progressive Era white-slavery panic, when films such as Traffic in Souls (1913) brought kidnapping, coercion, and vice traffic to a mass audience. In rumor form, the concern was that films taught vice methods, normalized sexual exploitation, and directed vulnerable women toward the very systems they claimed to expose.