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In the wake of World War I, the League of Nations and numerous investigative journalists went undercover to infiltrate sex-trafficking rings, conduct clandestine interviews with men and women participating in the vice trade, and identify the weak links in their operations in order to destroy this "global menace." These covert researchers discovered that the sex-trafficking industry was dominated not by vast underworld syndicates but by petty hustlers operating tiny fly-by-night operations. In Dealing in Human Flesh, Jeffrey S. Adler uses these unpublished field reports to map how small-time criminals conducted their sex-trafficking ventures. Adler shows that, despite policymakers' (and filmmakers') obsessions with the cartels and international crime rings of myth, it was in fact the business model of sex traffickers that narcotics and arms smugglers borrowed from to forge the surprisingly un-organized structure of early twenty-first-century human, cocaine, and weapons trafficking.
Jeffrey S. Adler is Professor of History and Criminology and Distinguished Teaching Scholar at the University of Florida. He is author of Bluecoated Terror: Jim Crow New Orleans and the Roots of Modern Police Brutality.
“Jeffrey Adler deftly shatters a slew of tenacious myths about sex trafficking. Fascinating and readable, this terrific book offers us a deep dive into the workings of a complex and changing world.”—Philippa Levine, Walter Prescott Webb Professor Emerita, University of Texas at Austin, and Honorary Professor, Queen Mary University of London
“Dealing in Human Flesh is a deeply researched study of post–World War I international efforts to combat sex trafficking. Drawing on undercover operatives’ reports of their globe-spanning investigations, Adler provides the first detailed account of how trafficking networks operated.”—Jennifer Fronc, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts Amherst
“Adler has brought admirable research, ingenious organization, and vivid writing to a grim and complicated subject that makes his book both informative and fascinating to read.”—Paul Knepper, Professor and Department Chair of Justice Studies, San José State University