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Sexual slavery refers to the organised coercion of unwilling people into different sexual practices. Sexual slavery may include single-owner sexual slavery, ritual slavery sometimes associated with traditional religious practices, slavery for primarily non-sexual purposes where sex is common, or forced prostitution.

In general, the nature of slavery means that the slave is de facto available for sex, and ordinary social conventions and legal protections that would otherwise constrain an owner's actions are not effective. For example, extra-marital sex between a married man and a slave was not considered adultery in most societies that accepted slavery.^[1]

The term "sex slave" and "consensual sexual slavery" are sometimes used in BDSM to refer to a consensual agreement between sexual partners (see also total power exchange).

Definition of sexual slavery

According to the Rome Statute (Article 7(2)(c)) sexual enslavement means the exercise of any or all of the powers attached to the "right of ownership" over a person. It comprises the repeated violation or sexual abuse or forcing the victim to provide sexual services as well as the rape by the captor. The crime has the character of a continuing offence. The Rome Statute's definition of sexual slavery includes situations where persons are forced to domestic servitude, marriage or any other forced labour involving sexual activity, as well as the trafficking of persons, in particular women and children.^[2]

Forced prostitution

Sexual slavery encompasses most, if not all, forms of forced prostitution. The terms "forced prostitution" or "enforced prostitution" appear in international and humanitarian conventions but have been insufficiently understood and inconsistently applied. "Forced prostitution" generally refers to conditions of control over a person who is coerced by another to engage in sexual activity.^[3] In 1949 the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (the 1949 Convention). The 1949 Convention supersedes a number of earlier conventions that covered some aspects of forced prostitution. Signatories are charged with three obligations under the 1949 Convention: prohibition of trafficking, specific administrative and enforcement measures, and social measures aimed at trafficked persons. The 1949 Convention presents two shifts in perspective of the trafficking problem in that it views prostitutes as victims of the procurers, and in that it eschews the terms "white slave traffic" and "women," using for the first time race- and gender-neutral language.^[4] Article 1 of the 1949 Convention provides punishment for any person who "[p]rocures, entices or leads away, for purposes of prostitution, another person" or "[e]xploits the prostitution of another person, even with the consent of that person." To fall under the provisions of the 1949 Convention, the trafficking need not cross international lines.^[5]

Crime against humanity

The Rome Statute Explanatory Memorandum, which defines the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, recognises rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, "or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity" as crime against humanity if the action is part of a widespread or systematic practice.^[6][7] Sexual slavery was first recognized as crime against humanity when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia issued arrest warrants based on the Geneva Conventions and Violations of the Laws or Customs of War. Specifically, it was recognised that Muslim women in Foca (southeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina) were subjected to systematic and widespread gang rape, torture and sexual enslavement by Bosnian Serb soldiers, policemen, and members of paramilitary groups after the takeover of the city in April 1992.^[8] The indictment was of major legal significance and was the first time that sexual assaults were investigated for the purpose of prosecution under the rubric of torture and enslavement as a crime against humanity.^[8] The indictment was confirmed by a 2001 verdict by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that rape and sexual enslavement are crimes again humanity. This ruling challenged the widespread acceptance of rape and sexual enslavement of women as intrinsic part of war.^[9] The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found three Bosnian Serb men guilty of rape of Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) women and girls (some as young as 12 and 15 years of age), in Foca, eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina. The charges were brought as crimes against humanity and war crimes. Furthermore two of the men were found guilty of the crime against humanity of sexual enslavement for holding women and girls captive in a number of de facto detention centers. Many of the women subsequently disappeared.^[9]

Historical Sexual Slavery

Arab Slave trade

Slave trade, including trade of sex slaves,^[10] fluctuated in certain regions in the Middle East up until the twentieth century (see also Arab slave trade and Islam and slavery).^[11] These slaves came largely from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caucasus,^[12] and often from parts of Central Asia and Eastern Europe.^[13] The Barbary pirates also captured many slaves from Western Europe and North America between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.^[14][15]

Slave women were required mainly as concubines and menials. A Muslim slaveholder was entitled by law to have sex with his slave women. While free women might own male slaves, they had no such right.^[16] Islam permits sexual relations between a male master and his female slave outside of marriage. This is referred to in the Qur'an as ma malakat aymanukum or "what your right hands possess".^[17][18]

In ancient Arabian custom, the child of a freeman by his slave was also a slave unless he was recognized and liberated by his father.^[19] In theory, the recognition by a master of his offspring by a slave woman was obligatory in Islamic society, and in the early period was often withheld. By the high Middle Ages it became normal and was unremarkable in a society where the sovereigns themselves were almost invariably the children of slave concubines.^[20] The mother receives the title of "umm walad" (lit. mother of a child), which is an improvement in her status as she can no longer be sold. Among Sunnis, she is automatically freed upon her master's death, however for Shi'a, she is only freed if her child is still alive; her value is then deducted from this child's share of the inheritance.^[21] Lovejoy writes that as an umm walad, they attained "an intermediate position between slave and free" pending their freedom, although they would sometimes be nominally freed as soon as they gave birth.^[22]

White slavery

In Victorian Britain, campaigning journalist William Thomas Stead, (editor of the Pall Mall Gazette) procured a 13 year-old girl for £5, an amount then equal to a labourer's monthly wage (see the Eliza Armstrong case). Panic over the "traffic in women" rose to a peak in England in the 1880s. At the time, "white slavery" was a natural target for defenders of public morality and crusading journalists. The ensuing outcry led to the passage of antislavery legislation in Parliament. However, it has been reported that the most extreme claims "were almost certainly exaggerated". Investigations of alleged abductions in Victorian England often found that the purported "victims" had participated voluntarily. Still, the "climate of prudery" prevalent in the late Victorian era made for easy scandalization of almost anything sexual, and various prohibitions were enacted. Parliament passed the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen in that year.^[23]

A subsequent scare occurred in the United States in the early twentieth century, peaking in 1910, when Chicago's U.S. attorney announced (without giving details) that an international crime ring was abducting young girls in Europe, importing them, and forcing them to work in Chicago brothels. These claims, and the panic they inflamed, led to the passage of the United States White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910. It also banned the interstate transport of females for immoral purposes. Its primary intent was to address prostitution and immorality. The act is better known as the Mann Act, after James Robert Mann, an American lawmaker.^[24]

Chinese immigrants in the U.S. were singled out as white slavers, although any such activity was restricted to the criminal segment of the Chinese community. As an example of this in American culture, the musical comedy Thoroughly Modern Millie features a Chinese-run prostitution ring, which is specifically referred to as "white slavery." The gangster movie Prime Cut has mid-West white slaves sold like cattle. In Christian Europe, on the other hand, the predominant image linked the term to Arab white slave traders and Ottoman harems.^{[citation needed]}

Paramour rights

The term paramour rights refers to an outdated American practice of a white man taking a Black woman to whom he was not married as his concubine. The term "paramour rights" was first used by Zora Neale Hurston. The practice, she observed, began prior to the Civil War and was reinforced afterwards by anti-miscegenation laws, which prohibited interracial marriage between whites and non-whites. Hurston first wrote about the practice in her anthropological studies of the turpentine camps of North Florida in the 1930s. She believed that the death knell of paramour rights was sounded by the trial of Ruby McCollum, a Black woman who murdered her white lover, Dr. C. Leroy Adams, in Live Oak, Florida, in 1952. McCollum's trial, which Hurston covered for the Pittsburgh Courier, may have been one of the first instances in American history in which a Black woman testified that a white man had forced sex upon her and demanded that she have his child.^{[citation needed]}

Bride kidnapping and raptio

Bride kidnapping, also known as marriage by abduction or marriage by capture, is a form of marriage practiced in some traditional cultures, in countries spanning Central Asia, the Caucasus region, parts of Africa, and among the Hmong in southeast Asia, the Tzeltal in Mexico, and the Romani in Europe.^{[citation needed]} Though the motivations behind bride kidnapping vary by region, the cultures with traditions of marriage by abduction are generally patriarchal with a strong social stigma on sex or pregnancy outside of marriage and illegitimate births.^[25] In some cases, the couple collude together to elope under the guise of a bride kidnapping, presenting their parents with a fait accompli. In most cases, however, the men who resort to capturing a wife are often of lower social status, because of poverty, disease, poor character or criminality.^[26] They are sometimes deterred from legitimately seeking a wife because of the payment the woman's family expects, the bride price (not to be confused with a dowry, paid by the woman's family).^[27]

Bride kidnapping is distinguished from raptio in that the former refers to the abduction of one woman by one man (and his friends and relatives), and is still a widespread practice, whereas the latter refers to the largescale abduction of women by groups of men, possibly in a time of war (see also war rape).^{[citation needed]} The Latin term raptio refers to abduction of women , either for marriage (e.g. kidnapping or elopement) or enslavement (particularly sexual slavery). In Roman Catholic canon law, raptio refers to the legal prohibition of matrimony if the bride was abducted forcibly (Canon 1089 CIC). The historical English term for the abduction of women is rape, see below; Frauenraub, originally from German, is still used in English in the field of art history.^{[citation needed]} The practice is surmised to have been common since anthropological antiquity. In Neolithic Europe, excavation of the Linear Pottery culture site at Asparn-Schletz, Austria, the remains of numerous slain victims were found. Among them, young adult females and children were clearly under-represented, suggesting that the attackers had killed the men but abducted the nubile females.^[28]

Sexual slavery during armed conflict and war

Rape and sexual violence has accompanied warfare in virtually every known historical era.^[29] Rape in the course of war is mentioned in the Bible. Examples include: "They must be dividing the spoil they took: there must be a damsel or two for each man…" (Judges 5:30 NAB)^[30] Before the 19th Century military circles supported the notion that all persons, including unarmed women and children, were still the enemy, with the belligerent having conquering rights over them. ^[31] "To the victor goes the spoils" has been a war cry for centuries and women were included as part of the spoils of war.^[32]

Institutionalised sexual slavery and enforced prostitution have been documented in a number of wars, most notably the Second World War. A widely publicised example are "comfort women", a euphemism for the up to 200,000 women who served in the Japanese army's brothels during World War II. Historians and researchers into the subject have stated that the majority were from Korea, China, and other occupied territories part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and were recruited by force or deception to serve as sex slaves.^{[33][34][35][36]} Similarly forced prostitution by the Nazis for sexual gratification of German soldiers and members of other Nazi controlled organizations became prevalent in occupied Europe during World War II.^[37] It is estimated that a minimum of 34,140 women from occupied states were forced to work as prostitutes during the Third Reich.^[38]

Contemporary sexual slavery

In Africa the colonial powers abolished slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but in areas outside their jurisdiction, such as the Mahdist empire in Sudan, the practice continued to thrive (see also: Slavery in modern Africa). Now, institutional slavery has been banned worldwide, but there are numerous reports of women sex slaves in areas without an effective government control, such as until recently, Sudan,^[39] Liberia,^[40] Sierra Leone,^[41] northern Uganda,^[42] Congo,^[43] Niger^[44] and Mauritania.^[45] In Ghana, Togo, and Benin, a form of religious prostitution known as trokosi ("ritual servitude") forcibly keeps thousands of girls and women in traditional shrines as "wives of the gods", where priests perform the sexual function in place of the gods.^[46]

In India as many as 200,000 Nepali girls, many under the age of 14, have been sold into sex slavery. Nepalese women and girls, especially virgins, are favoured in India because of their fair skin and young looks.^[47][48] In Pakistan, young girls (sometimes as young as 9 years old) on few instances have been sold by their families to brothels as sex slaves in big cities. Often this happens due to poverty or debt, whereby the family has no other way to raise the money than to sell the young girl^[49]. Few cases have also been recorded where wives and sisters have been sold to brothels to raise money for gambling, drinking or consuming drugs. Many sex slaves are also bought by 'agents' in Afghanistan who trick young girls into coming to Pakistan for well-paying jobs. Once in Pakistan they are taken to brothels (called Kharabat) and forced into sexual slavery for many years. ^[50][51]. Watta satta (Urdu: وٹہ سٹہ), a tribal practice; when executed without consent is also considered a form of sexual slavery by certain groups in Pakistan ^[52].

Forced prostitution

Forced prostitution is a form of sexual slavery that is considered more profitable than the drug trade and arms trade.^[53] Often the "owners" of these people will confiscate passports and/or money in order to make them completely dependent. Forced prostitution frequently takes place in the context of sex trafficking or human trafficking.^{[citation needed]}

Proponents of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in the United States, and Sweden's Act On Prohibiting The Purchase Of Sexual Services have sought to define all forms of prostitution as exploitive or de facto slavery, and place emphasis on suppressing the demand for sex services, by prosecuting profiteers and customers. While this effort is advanced as a means to protect trafficked children and women, that are variously estimated at 20,000-100,000 annually in the United States, who have issued numerous critiques of these laws as another form of prohibition and stigmatization, that serve mainly to marginalize sex workers.^[54] Prostitutes' rights organizations argue that decriminalization and extension of labor rights to sex workers is more effective in ensuring their economic, mental and medical health than any form of prohibition.^[55] The term "sex worker" itself is rejected by the advocates of anti-slavery laws, who argue that women cannot choose sex as an economic activity, and claim it is the criminal networks and customer demand that are the driving forces, not economic necessity.^{[citation needed]}