Her testimony brought a trafficker down ... the fate of a photographer’s assistant who was lured into prostitution is brilliantly pieced together
There is a moment in this study of Edwardian sex trafficking when the murk of history parts at the sound of a voice. It is a voice so arrestingly poignant that the hidden briefly becomes visible. Picked up for soliciting on the streets of London, Lydia Harvey explains to police why, months before, she failed to solicit a customer on her first night working as a prostitute: “I was thinking too much of home,” she tells them. And there she is, vivid on the evening that a grim reality dawned on her: a girl too far from home to hope for rescue.
Before she was trafficked to London via Argentina in 1910, Harvey was a photographer’s assistant in Wellington, New Zealand. She had come from a provincial home crowded with seven younger sisters and had already quit a position as a live-in maid. She was in search of the wider world. A fellow lodger in her boarding house offered to introduce her to people who could help her to travel. She was promised a job of “seeing gentlemen” and her glamorous new associates helped her compose a letter to her mother with news of work as a nursemaid abroad.
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