Though they continued in their co-operation and affiliation with the NVA, in 1921, the LVA decided to follow ‘other provincial centres’ in setting themselves up as an ‘independent society’. In real and practical terms, the greatest change that this brought about was a change in name. Up until this point, the association had officially acted under the title ‘National Vigilance Association (Liverpool Branch)’. From 1921, their title changed to ‘The Liverpool Society for the Prevention of International White Slave Traffic’, though for clarity they are referred to throughout this work under the more commonly known title of the LVA. This choice of moniker indicates that notions of white slavery and trafficking were still a source of moral anxiety during the interwar period. Charting local fears about white slavery during the interwar years, I argue that the LVA used narratives of urban sexual danger to plug themselves into national, and indeed international, conversations about the dangers of female migration.

Though more work is needed on white slavery in Britain, several historians have recently turned their attentions to the way the fight against trafficking formed an important part of the overall social purity movement's agenda in the early twentieth century. White slavery has been approached by these historians as a myth, a moral panic, and a system of classand gender-based labour relations. Recent research by Simon Jenkins has examined the prevalence of the racial stereotypes that underpinned notions of white slavery in interwar Britain, while Rachael Attwood has argued that the NVA's international efforts to combat white slavery at the turn of the century were undermined by the organization's reliance upon racial profiling. Yet the resilience of white slavery as a discursive tool in the construction and maintenance of gendered codes of urban morality requires further attention, not least because the rhetoric of white slavery continued, through the interwar and even into the post-war years, to be deployed in a nebulous fashion by social purists.

This chapter and the next concentrate on how the LVA appealed to the threat of white slavery in a bid to fashion their work as vital to the maintenance of social order.