Trafficking, Rape, or Deceptive Sex? A Historical Examination of Procurement Offences in England
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639221129107 |
| Author | Laura Lammasniemi |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Trafficking, Rape, or
Deceptive Sex? A Historical
Examination of
Procurement Offences in
England
Laura Lammasniemi
Law School, University of Warwick, UK
Abstract
This article examines the origins of procurement offences and their historical develop-
ment in England. Procurement offences were created in 1885 to tackle so-called white
slavery, as trafficking in women was then sensationally called. Through an analysis of a
series of lower-level and appeal cases heard between the years of 1885 and 1925 and
their social context, this article dispels myths about procurement for prostitution as
an international, organised crime, showing instead how it was localised and poverty
driven. The article also shows how procurement transformed from a narrowly defined
trafficking-related offence into a broadly applied sexual offence. It came to be used as a
‘catch-all’sexual offence that had the potential to encompass various distinct offences,
from trafficking, rape and child sex abuse to deceptive sex. The legal history of the pro-
curement is of particular importance as deception and questions of conditional consent
remain deeply contested in modern criminal law.
Keywords
Deceptive sex, legal history, procurement, prostitution, sexual offences, trafficking in
women
Corresponding author:
Laura Lammasniemi, Law School, University of Warwick, Library Road, CV4 7AL,Coventry, UK.
Email: Laura.lammasniemi@warwick.ac.uk
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2023, Vol. 32(4) 499–518
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09646639221129107
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
Introduction
On one Sunday morning in the autumn of 1910, 19-year-old Annie
1
was sitting in
Kennington Park in south London reading a book (Illustrated Police News,
1910d; Lowestoft Journal, 1910b). Born and raised in the countryside, Annie had
recentlyarrivedinLondontoworkindomesticservice.Whileinthepark,she
was befriended by a young man called Samuel. Samuel and his friend persuaded
her to go for a walk, leading to their residence in east London. While there,
AnniewasrapedbyamaninSamuel’s gang, then repeatedly assaulted and over
the following weeks was forced to work in prostitution (unreported, Old Bailey, 6
December 1910). Samuel and his gang were what the press called white slavers or
procurers: men and women who procured women and girls into prostitution by a
mix of deceit, force, and coercion. Samuel and his friends were all from Eastern
Europe, and in both the press and the court they were spoken of as a violent gang
of foreign men. Undoubtedly, Samuel and his men matched the public imagination
of what a ‘white slaver’,orsextrafficker in contemporary language, looked like and
their actions and methods matched what the public perceived as procurement. Yet
Samuel and his gangs were the exception.
Most so-called white slavers or those convicted of procurement in the period looked
nothing like Samuel, nor did his methods of procuring girls match the everyday procure-
ment trials at the turn of 20
th
century. Procurement offences, created as part of the
Criminal Law Amendment Act (CLAA) 1885, were enacted to combat trafficking as a
new form of international crime. They aimed to criminalise the procurement of women
and girls for prostitution and in specific, the actions of those who attempted to entice,
force, or deceive young girls into prostitution. Yet, as the article will show, the CLAA
was ineffective in meeting that core aim. Prosecutions for procurement were low, and
those prosecuted for procurement most were mostly poor, and many were women
known to the complainant. While most cases of procurement were prostitution related,
I argue that procurement also came to be used as a ‘lesser sexual offence’–a substitute
for a rape charge. It continued to be used in that context for the entire 20
th
century, in
cases of deceptive sex, in particular. I will show that this development happened in
two stages in the decades that followed the enactment of the CLAA. Firstly, the courts
accepted that a person could procure a woman for themselves, thereby accepting that
the offences were not limited to intermediaries and third parties in the context of procur-
ing for prostitution. Secondly, the procurement offences became a ‘catch-all’sexual
offence, cutting across a range of sexual offences, with the potential to encompass
various distinct offences.
Little, if anything, has been written about the history of procurement or the cases that
shaped our contemporary understanding of procurement, and by extension deceptive sex.
In historical scholarship, procurement received little attention beyond its association with
so-called white slavery and prostitution (Bartley 1999; Hearne, 2020; Laite, 2012 and
2021). Through an analysis of the prosecutions and the lives of those on trial, the
paper also contributes to social history, and the growing scholarship on white slavery
that has so far sought to problematise the term ‘white slavery’and focused on it
through the lens of victimhood (Lammasniemi, 2017), sex work (Laite, 2012 and
500 Social & Legal Studies 32(4)
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