To browse Academia. This scandal was exposed by Josephine Butler, a feminist and Evangelical, who did not rest until she had ended the violation and helped repeal the Act that governed it. She went on to campaign against child prostitution, the trafficking of frightened girls from Britain to Europe, and government-sponsored brothels in India.
In addition, Josephine was instrumental in raising the age of consent from 13 to She challenged nineteenth-century taboos and conventions in order to campaign for the rights of her gender. It is designed as an introduction to the topic. It also reflects the most recent research on 19th century feminist campaigns, prostitution and evangelicalism. Carrie Pemberton Ford. Josephine Butler waged a 16 year battle against the Contagious Diseases Act in the UK which were finally rescinded in Between and , 17, petitions against the acts bearing 2,, signatures were presented to the House of Commons, and during the same period, more than meetings were held much of this activity being driven forward by Josephine Butler and her cohorts in the Ladies National Association - one of the first female national organisations convened to apply social and political change, addressing parliamentarians and church leaders alike.
In her long campaign to repeal the forcible examination and detention of women through the Contagious Diseases Act, Butler directly encountered women who had been entrapped into Prostitution, and from her position as a privileged highly educated wife of an Oxford Clergyman and Academic, she made her own journey into confronting the double standards which she saw around the Establishment of her day, in the abuses of legalised prostitution and the trafficking of women in Europe and in India - under the portmanteau of 'White Slavery'.
This piece commissioned on the centenary of Butler's death, explores the continuities of concern which were expressed in the work of the UK based NGO Churches alert to sex trafficking across Europe, which developed over the course of its initiating five years a lively presence in the counter trafficking movement in the UK, with a round table movement amongst the denominations to provide much needed safe housing for women emerging from being sex trafficked into the UK, the Not for Sale movement marked by a successful mass postcard campaign, numerous meetings across the UK and theatrical commissions which assisted in bringing together the political will to ratify the Palermo Protocol and to absorb the recommendations of the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings, in and respectively.
In this Abstract the former CEO in her last year of office at CHASTE - looks at the struggles which Butler faced, the way in which she engaged Church and State in the UK, and the multiple challenges which the new definition of trafficking for sexual exploitation emerging from the Palermo Protocols invites the communities which Butler addressed, to face up to and see confronted, and systemic inequalities named and shamed in our time.
