From the League of Nations to Mangue: sex, race and police surveillance in Rio de Janeiro, 1920

SCHETTINI, CRISTIANA

Rio de Janeiro

Workshop; Policing connections: Atlantic Histories and Global Perspectives; 2017

PUC - Rio / UFRJ

In this presentation, I will address the building of international collaboration on the surveillance over the traffic in women in the 1920s in tension with local histories. I propose to consider the production of expertise and of knowledge in organizations such as the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children in the beginning of the 1920s as a chapter in a social history of cultural exchanges. As a history of encounters between different ideas, projects and persons, it resulted in more or less productive misunderstandings. In order to clarify this idea, I will examine a brief extent of the long journey undertaken by a team of three North-American agents, Samuel Auerbach, Paul Kinsie, who acted as an undercover agent, and Bascom Johnson, in the name of a Body of Experts of the Committee. In search of the routes of an international traffic in women, they first headed for South America: Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Río de Janeiro. After returning to the United States, they moved on to more than a hundred cities in three continents: from America to Asia, passing by Europe. The knowledge produced by that research was the basis of a report that had great influence over the international debate in traffic in women in the following decades. In it, some of the most important routes of world traffic in this period were those connecting European and South American port cities.