Despite being set up to tackle white slavery and prostitution, the LVA was mainly concerned with preventative work and with helping women on an individual and opportunistic basis. The annual reports of the LVA show little direct engagement with prostitutes, brothels or suspected pimps and traffickers, with the bulk of their work taking the form of chaperoning young women as they arrived in the city on boats and trains. As the previous chapter argued, the rhetoric of white slavery was politically potent for the LVA; it allowed them to tap into an urban horror story that immediately raised the stakes of their work. During the interwar years, the ‘archetypal white slave story’ revolved around young white women being abducted by ‘secret foreign syndicate[s]’, with the help of immoral women acting as ‘agents’ in the spread of vice. This ‘media and popular perception’ of a ‘helpless innocent victim decoyed by procurers’ undoubtedly informed the LVA's emphasis on the vulnerability of naive young women and the threat of immoral agents, but in general the LVA regarded the threat of white slavery in much more subtle terms than this.2 Evidence of women being taken to foreign lands and ‘forced into brothels’ was not especially forthcoming in Liverpool and, significantly, myths about girls being drugged with flowers and handkerchiefs were not focused on by the LVA.

In the absence of encounters with kidnapped women, the LVA deployed a broad reading of coercion to justify their work as a battle against the threat of white slavery. As such, the LVA possessed the same ‘messier mingling of good intentions and blinkered prejudices’ that had been characteristic of many a charitable effort for at least half a century. I argue that, in requiring only the suggestion of coercion to apply the rhetoric of white slavery to their case work, the LVA framed all manner of sexual transactions between young women and men as dangerous and exploitative. Young, working-class women who travelled for work tended to need money, which automatically meant that their engagement in any kind of prostitution, whether amateur or professional, could be deemed coercive.