SEX TRAFFICKER IN A THREE-PIECE SUIT

The Disappearance Of Lydia Harvey Julia Laite Profile £16.99

★★★★★

In February 1910, Lydia Harvey stepped on to a steamer that took her from her birthplace of New Zealand to Argentina. She was 16, workingclass and hopeful, in the company of new friends who had promised her a new life. A few weeks later she reappeared in London. Her hair was bleached blonde and she had caught scabies and gonorrhea from the men her travelling companions compelled her to have sex with. Her new friends had introduced themselves in Wellington as Mr and Mrs Cellis, but far from being a respectable married couple, they were actually a pair of sex traffickers named Antonio Carvelli and Veronique White (pictured, right).

The ‘Cellises’ had promised Lydia a life of fine clothes and gracious independence at the end of her journey. To a girl who had been through the rigours of domestic service, and then worked as a shopgirl, the attraction must have been overwhelming: as Julia Laite vividly describes, the early 20th Century was a time of mobility. Travel was more accessible than ever before, while new industries and growing cities offered people a chance to reinvent themselves.

But, writes Laite, ‘aspiration could turn to exploitation in the blink of an eye’. Whether Lydia knew what her new friends had meant when they said she would have to ‘see gentlemen’ is uncertain – she had had only one ‘sweetheart’ before she left New Zealand. Now she was embroiled in what was then known as the ‘white slave trade’, and we would refer to as international sex trafficking.

The ‘white slave trade’ was the subject of lurid press reports and much public anxiety, little of which seemed to stem from concern for the women being abused. Instead, explains Laite, it was animated by a mix of racism, angst about immigration and fear of workingclass women escaping their station. Traffickers easily escaped prosecution by arguing that their victims had never been of good character anyway.

Lydia was ‘lucky’ to be an acceptable victim, and there’s some trace of her on record. All the same, she never got to give her own account directly –‘inside the stories other people told about her, she disappeared again and again’. With an inventive mix of sources, Laite brilliantly summons up one girl’s life, dreams and suffering. It’s ingenious history writing, but as the author says, it’s a story being repeated daily for today’s victims of traffickers.