Organ theft narratives

The Fear of White Slavery reached epidemic proportions during Summer and Autumn of 1912 in London. All sorts of stories of sudden disappearances, abductions and attempts to entice innocent girls were repeated from mouth to mouth, and Frederic Bullock [the Head of Scotland Yard's special new White Slavery Bureau] judged them to be unfounded rumors. "Fake nurses were said to be on the prowl in department stores, a Hampstead hairdresser's daughter was carried off in a motor car and girls were being chloroformed in the streets." Still in 1913, "The 5,000 girls of London's telephone exchanges were given official warnings to watch out for drugged chocolates and similar dangers" (Bristow 1977:192-193). A similar surge of panic occurred in America from 1912-1914, involving all classes of young women: students, shop attendants, and telephone operators among others. Any contact with a stranger was grounds for a complaint and accusation. Other panics occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. In England a new surge of anxiety erupted in 1929 when it proved "impossible to stem the tide of reports about pinpricks and numb thighs on provincial transportation systems and in cinemas.

One widespread tale concerned the hag-like old lady who asked for help crossing the street and then bagged her prey with the aid of a `dope ring,' a hollowed-out piece of jewelry fitted with a needle and filled with quickacting curare poison" (Bristow 1977:197).

These attacks of panic occurred against a background of genuine fears generated by a changing world; it was the age of the dark cinema house, the powerful motor-car that resembled a private hotel-room on wheels, mass transportation systems that enabled rural folk to have indiscriminate contact with city dwellers, all combined with new freedoms won by women in the emancipation movement to create new fears and insecurities which-even when repressed-provided fertile grounds on which the hysteria of the White-Slavery rumors could grow and prosper. All of these fears were expressed in the anguish and hatred that people felt for the evil traffickers that played for adults the same cathartic role as scary folktales do for young children. As in the case of the `Blood Libel Legend," the hatred was often directed against Jews as Anti-Semitism was nourished by the horror tales of White Slavery. As one investigator has expressed:

White-slavery allegations were similar to the other notorious charges in the anti-Semite arsenal; that Jews were by nature criminal, that they organized widespread conspiracies to corrupt and pollute the Christian world and that they ritually murdered Christian children [...] The parallels between the blood libel and white slavery are particularly striking. Each involves violence to a defenseless young person and the projection of hate onto a symbolic substitute for the evil father. White slavery was the sexualization of the blood libel (Bristow 1982:46).

Alhough the notion that the blood of children was a powerful curing agent anticipated the later organ-theft lore involving children, it was the hysteria of the White Slavery legends that had the greatest influence on the emergence of organ-theft beliefs and legends. The hysteria that emerged from both the White Slavery tradition and from organ-theft lore was supported by a foundation of reality that not only made the accounts plausible but also generated well-founded fears and concerns. In both legend cycles there are realities (enforced prostitution and the internationalization of prostitution for White Slavery), and crimes linked to the development of international adoption and trade in organs for organ-theft lore which provided the atmosphere that both reflected and gave expression to valid concerns and fears. It is popular culture that selects and expands-in close partnership with spontaneous folk creation-frightening but good-totell narratives that are vehicles for well grounded fears; one might say that even though many of the tales are not factual, they are, in a symbolic sense, true. It is a fact that opportunistic propagandists manipulate the stories to exploit their symbolic force to influence public opinion for attaining their own aims; but the stories eventually elude their manipulators and continue their independent existence.