Thaddeus Russell on Sex Slaves and the Surveillance State

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Thaddeus Russell looks back on the harmful mythmaking about "white slavery" in the Progressive Era. It helped create, expand, and strengthen the police powers of an array of government agencies. Since the onset of the panic, those agencies have imprisoned and sterilized hundreds of thousands of women who worked as prostitutes, taken their children from them, forced them onto the streets and into dependent relationships with male criminals, and made their jobs among the most dangerous in the world.