Beware of Pity: The League of Nations’ Treatment of Prostitution
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This article analyzes the League of Nations’ support of eugenic ideas. The League’s anti-prostitution campaigns can be understood as an experiment in internationalism, as it stretched its mandate to tackle an issue that had hitherto been regarded as a national problem. The organization built a web of experts that circulated various ideas around the “mental deficiency” of prostitutes. As such, the League was not an exception in a period in which biological understandings of crime and deviancy were common. What is surprising is that the League succeeded in concealing its flirting with eugenics from both contemporary critics and present-day scholars.
Réseaux sociaux