La traite des êtres humains, de la légende urbaine à la politique publique

Abstract

The White slave trade (nowadays known as human trafficking) is the motif of one of the most well-known and well-studied urban legends: a young girl is drugged before being taken away and forced into prostitution in a foreign country. But trafficking of human beings is also, and has been for a long time, the object of specific public policies that have been legitimated by international conventions and enforced by both police and justice. The coexistence of an urban legend and of a public policy stands as an enigma that this article intends to solve: how can one imagine that important means are mobilised against so dubious facts? A historical and sociological analysis reveals that popular beliefs and institutional stances have mutually consolidated, each one giving weight to the plausibility of the motif of the trade.