Interesting article on reason.com.

"This was no mere harmless mythmaking. The claims made by the movement against "white slavery" 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."

"Braun was astonished to find that in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Brussels, prostitutes were considered by authorities and the cultures at large to be ordinary wage laborers. He was even more astonished by the prostitutes themselves, who told him that they viewed the U.S. primarily as a lucrative market, since American morality constrained the supply of competitors, thus raising prices for their work."

"Among the government agencies empowered by the white-slavery hysteria was the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), which was created in 1908 in part to investigate the importation and inter-state transportation of prostitutes. With the expanded mandate of the Mann Act, the Bureau grew rapidly, from some 60 agents to more than 350, opening up a White Slave Division and operating in every major city in the country within just five years."

"During this period, white-slavery cases constituted close to a third of the Bureau's work. By the time it was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935, the agency had investigated tens of thousands of Americans for alleged violation of the Mann Act. Pliley has found that a sizable portion of those cases involved not commercial vice but relations between older men and girls, adultery, promiscuous teenage girls, and interracial couples."

"In another parallel to a century ago, several scholars have identified a confluence of human-trafficking discourse with calls for restrictions on immigration. The new panic has also given rise to new agencies within municipal and state governments whose charge to prosecute "traffickers" has resulted in the prosecution of greater numbers of women voluntarily selling sex for money. In Florida, the state legislature is considering a bill that would allow involuntary psychiatric hospitalization of sex-trafficking "victims."