Sexual slavery and sexual exploitation is attaching the right of ownership over one or more persons with the intent of coercing or otherwise forcing them to engage in one or more sexual activities. This includes forced labor, reducing a person to a servile status (including forced marriage) and sex trafficking persons, such as the sexual trafficking of children.
Sexual slavery may also involve single-owner sexual slavery; ritual slavery, sometimes associated with certain religious practices, such as ritual servitude in Ghana, Togo and Benin; slavery for primarily non-sexual purposes but where non-consensual sexual activity is common; or forced prostitution. Concubinage
was a traditional form of sexual slavery in many cultures, in which
women spent their lives in sexual servitude. In some cultures,
concubines and their children had distinct rights and legitimate social
positions.
The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action calls for an international effort to eradicate sexual slavery as an abuse of human rights. The incidence of sexual slavery by country has been studied and tabulated by UNESCO, with the cooperation of various international agencies.
The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action calls for an international effort to eradicate sexual slavery as an abuse of human rights. The incidence of sexual slavery by country has been studied and tabulated by UNESCO, with the cooperation of various international agencies.
Definitions
The Rome Statute (1998) (which defines the crimes over which the International Criminal Court may have jurisdiction) encompasses crimes against humanity
(Article 7) which include "enslavement" (Article 7.1.c) and "sexual
enslavement" (Article 7.1.g) "when committed as part of a widespread or
systematic attack directed against any civilian population". It also
defines sexual enslavement as a war crime and a breach of the Geneva Conventions
when committed during an international armed conflict (Article
8.b.xxii) and indirectly in an internal armed conflict under
Article(8.c.ii), but the courts jurisdiction over war crimes is
explicitly excluded from including crimes committed during "situations
of internal disturbances and tensions, such as riots, isolated and
sporadic acts of violence or other acts of a similar nature" (Article
8.d).
The text of the Rome Statute does not explicitly define sexual
enslavement, but does define enslavement as "the exercise of any or all
of the powers attaching to the right of ownership over a person and
includes the exercise of such power in the course of trafficking in
persons, in particular women and children" (Article 7.2.c).
In the commentary on the Rome Statute, Mark Klamberg states:
Sexual slavery is a particular form of enslavement which includes limitations on one's autonomy, freedom of movement and power to decide matters relating to one's sexual activity. Thus, the crime also includes forced marriages, domestic servitude or other forced labor that ultimately involves forced sexual activity. In contrast to the crime of rape, which is a completed offence, sexual slavery constitutes a continuing offence. ... Forms of sexual slavery can, for example, be practices such as the detention of women in "rape camps" or "comfort stations", forced temporary "marriages" to soldiers and other practices involving the treatment of women as chattel, and as such, violations of the peremptory norm prohibiting slavery.
Type
Commercial sexual exploitation of adults
Commercial sexual exploitation of adults (often referred to as "sex trafficking") is a type of human trafficking
involving the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or
receipt of people, by coercive or abusive means for the purpose of
sexual exploitation. Commercial sexual exploitation is not the only form
of human trafficking and estimates vary as to the percentage of human
trafficking which is for the purpose of transporting someone into sexual
slavery.
The BBC News cited a report by UNODC
as listing the most common destinations for victims of human
trafficking in 2007 as Thailand, Japan, Israel, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the US. The report lists
Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova and
Ukraine as major sources of trafficked persons.
Commercial sexual exploitation of children
Commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) includes child prostitution (or child sex trafficking), child sex tourism, child pornography,
or other forms of transactional sex with children. The Youth Advocate
Program International (YAPI) describes CSEC as a form of coercion and violence against children and a contemporary form of slavery.
A declaration of the World Congress Against the Commercial Sexual
Exploitation of Children, held in Stockholm in 1996, defined CSEC as,
"sexual abuse by the adult and remuneration in cash or in kind to the
child or to a third person or persons. The child is treated as a sexual
object and as a commercial object".
Child prostitution
Child prostitution, or child sex trafficking, is a form of sexual slavery. It is the commercial sexual exploitation of children, in which a child performs the services of prostitution, usually for the financial benefit of an adult.
India's federal police said in 2009 that they believed around 1.2 million children in India to be involved in prostitution. A CBI statement said that studies and surveys sponsored by the Ministry of Women and Child Development estimated about 40% of India's prostitutes to be children.
Thailand’s Health System Research Institute reported that children in prostitution make up 40% of prostitutes in Thailand.
In some parts of the world, child prostitution is tolerated or
ignored by the authorities. Reflecting an attitude which prevails in
many developing countries, a judge from Honduras said, on condition of
anonymity: "If the victim [the child prostitute] is older than 12, if he
or she refuses to file a complaint and if the parents clearly profit
from their child's commerce, we tend to look the other way".
Child sex tourism
Child sex tourism is a form child sex trafficking, and is mainly centered on buying and selling children into sexual slavery. It is when an adult travels to a foreign country for the purpose of engaging in commercially facilitated child sexual abuse.
Child sex tourism results in both mental and physical consequences for
the exploited children, that may include "disease (including HIV/AIDS),
drug addiction, pregnancy, malnutrition, social ostracism, and possibly
death", according to the State Department of the United States. Thailand, Cambodia, India, Brazil and Mexico have been identified as leading hot spots of child sexual exploitation.
Child pornography
Child pornography, sometimes referred to as 'child abuse images', refers to images or films depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child. As such, child pornography is often a visual record of child sexual abuse. Abuse of the child occurs during the sexual acts which are photographed in the production of child pornography,
and the effects of the abuse on the child (and continuing into
maturity) are compounded by the wide distribution and lasting
availability of the photographs of the abuse.
Child sex trafficking often involves child pornography.
Children are commonly purchased and sold for sexual purposes without
the parents knowing. In these cases, children are often used to produce
child pornography, especially sadistic forms of child pornography where
they may be tortured.
Forced prostitution
Most, if not all, forms of forced prostitution may be viewed as a kind of sexual slavery.
The terms "forced prostitution" and "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.
The issue of consent in prostitution is hotly debated. Opinion in
places such as Europe has been divided over the question of whether
prostitution should be considered as a free choice or as inherently
exploitative of women.
The law in Sweden, Norway and Iceland – where it is illegal to pay for
sex, but not to sell sexual services – is based on the notion that all
forms of prostitution are inherently exploitative, opposing the notion
that prostitution can be voluntary. In contrast, prostitution is a recognized profession in countries such as the Netherlands and Germany.
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.
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.
Forced marriage
A forced marriage is a marriage where one or both participants are married, without their freely given consent. Forced marriage is a form of sexual slavery. Causes for forced marriages include customs such as bride price and dowry; poverty; the importance given to female premarital virginity; "family honor";
the fact that marriage is considered in certain communities a social
arrangement between the extended families of the bride and groom;
limited education and economic options; perceived protection of cultural
or religious traditions; assisting immigration. Forced marriage is most common in parts of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Crime against humanity
The Rome Statute Explanatory Memorandum, which defines the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, recognizes rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, forced 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. Sexual slavery was first recognized as a 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 recognized that Muslim women in Foča (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.
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. The indictment was confirmed by a 2001 verdict by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
that rape and sexual enslavement are crimes against humanity. This
ruling challenged the widespread acceptance of rape and sexual
enslavement of women as intrinsic part of war. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found three Bosnian Serb men guilty of rape of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) women and girls – some as young as 12 and 15 years of age – in Foča, eastern Bosnia and 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 had subsequently
disappeared.
In areas controlled by Islamic militants, non-Muslim women are
enslaved in occupied territories. Many Islamists see the abolition of
slavery as forced upon Muslims by the West and want to revive the
practice of slavery.
Bride kidnapping and raptio
The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Nicolas Poussin, Rome, 1637–38 (Louvre Museum)
Bride kidnapping, also known as marriage by abduction or marriage by captive, is a form of forced marriage practised in some traditional cultures. Bride kidnapping has reportedly occurred 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.
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 against sex or pregnancy outside marriage and illegitimate births. In most cases, however, the men who resort to capturing a wife are often of lower social status,
whether because of poverty, disease, poor character or criminality. In
some cases, the couple collude together to elope under the guise of a
bride kidnapping, presenting their parents with a fait accompli. These men 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).
The Mongol invasion of Hungary. The Mongols, with captured women, are on the left, the Hungarians, with one saved woman, on the right.
Bride kidnapping is distinguished from raptio in that the
former refers to the abduction of one woman by one man (and/or his
friends and relatives), and is often a widespread and ongoing practice.
The latter refers to the large-scale abduction of women by groups of
men, most frequently in a time of war (see also war rape). The Latin term raptio refers to abduction of women, either for marriage (by 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 practice of raptio is surmised to have existed since anthropological antiquity. In Neolithic Europe, excavation of a Linear Pottery culture site at Asparn-Schletz, Austria,
unearthed the remains of numerous slain victims. Among them, young
adult females and children were clearly under-represented, suggesting
that perhaps the attackers had killed the men but abducted the young
females.
During armed conflict and war
Rape and sexual violence have accompanied warfare in virtually every known historical era.
Before the 19th century, military circles supported the notion that all
persons, including unarmed women and children, were still the enemy,
with the belligerent (nation or person engaged in conflict) having
conquering rights over them.
"To the victor goes the spoils" has been a war cry for centuries and women were included as part of the spoils of war.
Institutionalized sexual slavery and enforced prostitution have been
documented in a number of wars, most notably the Second World War and in the War in Bosnia.
Historical cases
Ancient
Ancient Greece and Roman Empire
Employing female and occasionally male slaves for prostitution was
common in the Hellenistic and Roman world. Ample references exist in
literature, law, military reports and art. A prostitute (slave or free)
existed outside the moral codex restricting sexuality in Greco-Roman
society and enjoyed little legal protection. Male intercourse with a slave was not considered adultery by either society.
Asia
During the Chinese domination of Vietnam, Vietnamese girls were sold as sex slaves to the Chinese. A large trade developed where the native girls of Vietnam were enslaved and brought north to the Chinese. Southern Yue girls were sexually eroticized in Chinese literature and in poems written by Chinese who were exiled to the south.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Portuguese visitors and their South Asian lascar (and sometimes African) crew members often engaged in slavery in Japan, where they bought or captured young Japanese women and girls, who were either used as sexual slaves on their ships or taken to Macau and other Portuguese colonies in Southeast Asia, the Americas, and India. For example, in Goa, a Portuguese colony in India, there was a community of Japanese slaves and traders during the late 16th and 17th centuries.
During the 1662 Siege of Fort Zeelandia in which Chinese Ming loyalist forces commanded by Koxinga besieged and defeated the Dutch East India Company and conquered Taiwan, the Chinese took Dutch women and children prisoner. The Dutch missionary Antonius Hambroek,
two of his daughters, and his wife were among the Dutch prisoners of
war with Koxinga. Koxinga sent Hambroek to Fort Zeelandia demanding he
persuade them to surrender or else Hambroek would be killed when he
returned. Hambroek returned to the Fort, where two of his other
daughters were. He urged the Fort not to surrender, and returned to
Koxinga's camp. He was then executed by decapitation, and in addition to
this, a rumor was spreading among the Chinese that the Dutch were
encouraging the native Taiwan aboriginals to kill Chinese, so Koxinga
ordered the mass execution of Dutch male prisoners in retaliation, in
addition to a few women and children also being killed. The surviving
Dutch women and children were then turned into slaves. Koxinga took
Hambroek's teenage daughter as a concubine,
and Dutch women were sold to Chinese soldiers to become their wives,
the daily journal of the Dutch fort recorded that "the best were
preserved for the use of the commanders, and then sold to the common
soldiers. Happy was she that fell to the lot of an unmarried man, being
thereby freed from vexations by the Chinese women, who are very jealous
of their husbands." In 1684 some of these Dutch wives were still captives of the Chinese.
Some Dutch physical looks like auburn and red hair among people in
regions of south Taiwan are a consequence of this episode of Dutch women
becoming concubines to the Chinese commanders.
The Chinese took Dutch women as slave concubines and wives and they
were never freed: in 1684 some were reported to be living, in Quemoy a
Dutch merchant was contacted with an arrangement to release the
prisoners which was proposed by a son of Koxinga's but it came to
nothing. The Chinese officers used the Dutch women they received as concubines. The Dutch women were used for sexual pleasure by Koxinga's commanders.
This event of Dutch women being distributed to the Chinese soldiers and
commanders was recorded in the daily journal of the fort.
A teenage daughter of the Dutch missionary Anthonius Hambroek became a
concubine to Koxinga, she was described by the Dutch commander Caeuw as
"a very sweet and pleasing maiden". Dutch language accounts record this incident of Chinese taking Dutch women as concubines and the date of Hambroek's daughter.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a network of Chinese prostitutes trafficked to cities like Singapore, and a separate network of Japanese prostitutes being trafficked across Asia, in countries such as China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and British India, in what was then known as the ’Yellow Slave Traffic’. There was also a network of prostitutes from continental Europe being trafficked to India, Ceylon, Singapore, China and Japan at around the same time, in what was then known as the ’White Slave Traffic’. Karayuki-san (唐行きさん, literally "Ms. Gone-to-China" but actually meaning Ms. Gone Abroad")
were Japanese girls and women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
who were trafficked from poverty stricken agricultural prefectures in
Japan to destinations in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Siberia (Russian Far East), Manchuria, and British India
to serve as prostitutes and sexually serviced men from a variety of
races, including Chinese, Europeans, native Southeast Asians, and
others. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a network of
Japanese prostitutes being trafficked across Asia, in countries such as China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and British India, in what was then known as the ’Yellow Slave Traffic’. The main destinations of karayuki-san included China (particularly Shanghai), Hong Kong, the Philippines, Borneo, Sumatra,
Thailand, Indonesia, and the western USA (in particular San Francisco).
They were often sent to Western colonies in Asia where there was a
strong demand from Western military personnel and Chinese men. The experience of Japanese prostitutes in China was written about in a book by a Japanese woman, Tomoko Yamazaki.
Japanese girls were easily trafficked abroad since Korean and Chinese
ports did not require Japanese citizens to use passports and the
Japanese government realized that money earned by the karayuki-san
helped the Japanese economy since it was being remmitted, and the Chinese boycott of Japanese products in 1919 led to reliance on revenue from the karayuki-san.
Since the Japanese viewed non-westerners as inferior, the karayuki-san
Japanese women felt humiliated since they mainly sexually served Chinese
men or native Southeast Asians.
Borneo natives, Malaysians, Chinese, Japanese, French, American,
British and men from every race utilized the Japanese prostitutes of
Sandakan.
A Japanese woman named Osaki said that the men, Japanese, Chinese,
whites, and natives, were dealt with alike by the prostitutes regardless
of race, and that a Japanese prostitute's "most disgusting customers"
were Japanese men, while they used "kind enough" to describe Chinese
men, and the English and Americans were the second best clients, while
the native men were the best and fastest to have sex with.
During World War II, Empire of Japan organized a governmental system of "comfort women", which is a euphemism
of military sex slaves for the estimated 200,000, mostly Korean,
Chinese, and Filipino women who were forced into sexual slavery in Japanese military "comfort stations" during World War II.
Japan collected, carried, and confined Asian ladies coercively and
collusively to have sexual intercourse with Japan's soldiers during
their invasions across East Asia
and Southeast Asia. Some Korean women claim that these cases should be
judged by an international tribunal as child sex violence. The legal
demand has been made because of the victims' anger at what they see as
the inequity of the existing legal measures and the denial of Japan's
involvement in child sex slavery and kidnapping. On 28 December 2015,
Japan and South Korea agreed that Japan would pay 1 billion Yen into a
fund for a Memorial Hall of comfort women.
Despite this agreement, some Korean victims have complained that they
were not consulted during the negotiation process. They demand that
Japan and Korea did not seek both the legal recognition of their claim
and the revision of Japanese history textbooks.
Arab slave trade
Slave trade, including trade of sex slaves, fluctuated in certain regions in the Middle East up until the 20th century. These slaves came largely from Sub-Saharan Africa (mainly Zanj), the Caucasus (mainly Circassians), Central Asia (mainly Sogdians) and Central and Eastern Europe (mainly Saqaliba). The Barbary pirates also captured 1.25 million slaves from Western Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In contrast to the Atlantic slave trade
where the male-female ratio was 2:1 or 3:1, the Arab slave trade
usually had a higher female:male ratio instead, suggesting a general
preference for female slaves. Concubinage
and reproduction served as incentives for importing female slaves
(often European), though many were also imported mainly for performing
household tasks.
White slavery
In
English-speaking countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the
phrase "white slavery" was used to refer to sexual enslavement of white
women. It was particularly associated with accounts of women enslaved in
Middle Eastern harems, such as the so-called Circassian beauties. The phrase gradually came to be used as a euphemism for prostitution.
The phrase was especially common in the context of the exploitation of
minors, with the implication that children and young women in such
circumstances were not free to decide their own fates.
Statue entitled The White Slave by Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, a controversial sculpture meant to depict modern western sexual enslavement
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 laborer's monthly wage (see the Eliza Armstrong case). Moral 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. Parliament passed the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen in that year.
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, generally known as the "Mann Act". It also banned the
interstate transport of females for immoral purposes. Its primary intent
was to address prostitution and immorality.
Immigration inspectors at Ellis Island
in New York City were held responsible for questioning and screening
European prostitutes from the U.S. Immigration inspectors expressed
frustration at the ineffectiveness of questioning in determining if a
European woman was a prostitute, and claimed that many were "lying" and
"framing skillful responses" to their questions. They were also accused
of negligence should they accept a fictitious address from an immigrant
or accept less-than-complete responses. Inspector Helen Bullis
investigated several homes of assignment in the Tenderloin district of
New York, and found brothels existed in the early 20th century in New
York City. She compiled a list of houses of prostitutes, their
proprietors, and their "inmates".
The New York inspection director wrote a report in 1907, defending
against accusations of negligence, saying there was no sense to the
public "panic", and he was doing everything he could to screen European
immigrants for prostitution, especially unmarried ones. In a report by
the Commissioner General of Immigration in 1914, the Commissioner said
that many prostitutes would intentionally marry American men to secure
citizenship. He said that for prostitutes, it was "no difficult task to
secure a disreputable citizen who will marry a prostitute" from Europe.
Americas
As early as the 1490s, Christopher Columbus established trade in sex slaves on Hispaniola which included sex slaves as young as nine years old. Within 25 years of being colonized, the population of Hispaniola natives declined, dying from enslavement, massacre or disease.
From the beginning of African slavery in the North American
colonies, white men took enslaved African women as concubines or
occasional mistresses. As populations increased, slave women might be
taken advantage of by white overseers, planter's younger sons before
they married, and other white men associated with the slaveholders. Some
were sold into brothels outright.
Plaçage, a formalized system of concubinage among slave women or free people of color,
developed in Louisiana and particularly New Orleans by the 18th
century. Young mixed-race women (considered highly desirable) would
receive a dowry or property as part of an associated settlement
negotiated by their mothers with white men. The fathers would often pay
for education of their mixed-race children born of these unions,
especially sons, who might be educated in France and enter the army. In
recent years, at least three historians (viz. Kenneth Aslakson, Emily Clark, and Carol Schlueter) have challenged the historicity of quadroon balls and have referred to the institution of Plaçage as "a myth".
But Paul Heinegg's research showed that most mixed-race, free black
families in the censuses of 1790–1810 were descended from unions
between free white women and African men, whether free, indentured
servant or slave, that took place in colonial Virginia. It had half the
slaves in the colonies at the time of the Revolution. In the early
colonial years, the working class of indentured servants and slaves
often worked and lived together.
From the 17th century, Virginia and other colonies passed laws
determining the social status of children born in the colonies. Under
English common law in England, children of two English subjects took the
status of the father. But Africans were never considered English
subjects. To settle the issue of the status of children born in the
colony, Virginia passed a law in 1662 that ruled that children would
take the status of their mother at birth, under the Roman legal
principle known as partus sequitur ventrem.
Thus all children born to enslaved mothers were legally slaves,
regardless of the paternity or ancestry of their fathers. They were
bound for life and could be sold like any slave unless formally freed.
The term "white slaves" was sometimes used for those mixed-race
or mulatto slaves who had a visibly high proportion of European
ancestry. Among the most notable at the turn of the 19th century was Sally Hemings, who was 3/4 white and believed by historians to be a half sister of Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson by their common father John Wayles. Hemings is known for having four surviving children from her decades-long concubinage with President Thomas Jefferson;
they were 7/8 European by ancestry. Three of these mixed-race children
passed easily into white society as adults (Jefferson freed them all –
two informally and two in his will). Three of his Hemings grandsons
served as white men in the Union Regular Army in the American Civil War;
John Wayles Jefferson advanced to the rank of colonel.
Not all white fathers abandoned their slave children; some
provided them with education, apprenticeships, or capital; some wealthy
planters sent their mixed-race children to the North for education and
sometimes for freedom. Some men freed both their slave mistresses and
their mixed-race children, especially in the 20 years after the American
Revolution, but southern legislatures made such manumissions more
difficult. Both Mary Chesnut and Fanny Kemble wrote in the 19th century about the scandal of white men having their mistresses and natural mixed-race
children as part of their extended households. Numerous mixed-race
families were begun before the Civil War, and many originated in the
Upper South.
After slaves were emancipated, many states passed anti-miscegenation laws, which prohibited interracial marriage
between whites and non-whites. But this did not stop white men from
taking sexual advantage of black women by using their social positions
of power under the Jim Crow system and white supremacy, or in other parts of the country by ordinary power and wealth dynamics. For instance, in the 20th century future politician Strom Thurmond
at age 21 had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old maid in his
parents' household and she became pregnant. He did provide support for
their daughter. The girl was officially raised by her maternal aunt and
uncle, not learning about her biological parents until she was in her
late teens. She met Thurmond, but said nothing publicly about her status
as his daughter until after Thurmond's death. With his family's
agreement, her name has been added as one of his children on his
memorial.
Zora Neale Hurston wrote about contemporary sexual practices in her anthropological studies in the 1930s of the turpentine camps of North Florida. She noted that white men with power often forced black women into sexual relationships.
Although she never named the practice as "paramour rights,"
author C. Arthur Ellis ascribed this term to the fictionalized Hurston
in his book, Zora Hurston and the Strange Case of Ruby McCollum. The same character asserted that the death knell of paramour rights was sounded by the trial of Ruby McCollum, a black woman who murdered Dr. C. Leroy Adams, in Live Oak, Florida,
in 1952. She said he had forced her into sex and bearing his child.
Journalist Hurston covered McCollum's trial in 1952 for the Pittsburgh Courier. McCollum's case was further explored in the 2015 documentary You Belong to Me: Sex, Race and Murder in the South.
The Chinese Tanka females were sold from Guangzhou to work as prostitutes for the overseas Chinese male community in the United States. During the California Gold Rush
in the late 1840s, Chinese merchants transported thousands of young
Chinese girls, including babies, from China to the United States. They
sold the girls into sexual slavery within the red light district of San
Francisco. Girls could be bought for $40 (about $1104 in 2013 dollars)
in Guangzhou and sold for $400 (about $11,040 in 2013 dollars) in the United States. Many of these girls were forced into opium addiction and lived their entire lives as prostitutes.
During the Second World War
Germany during World War II
During World War II, Germany established brothels in Nazi concentration camps (Lagerbordell). The women forced to work in these brothels came from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, Soldier's brothels (Wehrmachtsbordell)
were usually organized in already established brothels or in hotels
confiscated by the Germans. The leaders of the Wehrmacht became
interested in running their own brothels when sexual disease spread
among the soldiers. In the controlled brothels, the women were checked
frequently to avoid and treat sexually transmittable infections (STI).
It is estimated that a minimum of 34,140 women from occupied states were forced to work as prostitutes during the Third Reich. In occupied Europe, the local women were often forced into prostitution. On 3 May 1941 the Foreign Ministry of the Polish government-in-exile
issued a document describing the mass Nazi raids made in Polish cities
with the goal of capturing young women, who later were forced to work in
brothels used by German soldiers and officers. Women often tried to
escape from such facilities, with at least one mass escape known to have
been attempted by women in Norway.
Japan during World War II
Rangoon, Burma. 8 August 1945. A young ethnic Chinese woman from one of the Imperial Japanese Army's "comfort battalions" is interviewed by an RAF officer.
Historical Marker, in the memory of Comfort women; Plaza Lawton, Liwasang Bonifacio, Manila
"Comfort women" are a widely publicized example of sexual slavery.
The term refers to the women, from occupied countries, who were forced
to serve as sex slaves in the Japanesearmy's camps during World War II.
Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with numbers ranging
from as low as 20,000 from some Japanese scholars to as high as 410,000
from some Chinese scholars.
The numbers are still being researched and debated. The majority of
women were taken from Korea, China, and other occupied territories part
of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They were often recruited by kidnapping or deception to serve as sex slaves.
Sometimes women were raped to the point of death, or killed by torture,
such as having their breasts sliced off or having their abdomens slit
open.
Each slave was reportedly raped "an average of 10 rapes per day
(considered by some to be a low estimate), for a five-day work week;
this figure can be extrapolated to estimate that each 'comfort girl' was
raped around 50 times per week or 2,500 times per year. For three years
of service – the average – a comfort girl would have been raped 7,500
times." (Parker, 1995 United Nations Commissions on Human Rights)
Chuo University professor Yoshiaki Yoshimi states there were
about 2,000 centers where as many as 200,000 Japanese, Chinese, Korean,
Filipino, Taiwanese, Burmese, Indonesian, Dutch and Australian women
were interned and used as sex slaves.
After World War II
Japan
Yasuura House, one such center
The Recreation and Amusement Association (特殊慰安施設協会 Tokushu Ian Shisetsu Kyōkai (Special Comfort Facility Association)) (RAA) was the largest of the organizations established by the Japanese government to provide organized prostitution and other leisure facilities for occupying Allied troops immediately following World War II.
The RAA established its first brothel on 28 August: the Komachien in Ōmori.
By December 1945, the RAA owned 34 facilities, 16 of which were
"comfort stations". The total number of prostitutes employed by the RAA
amounted to 55,000 at its peak.
The dispersal of prostitution made it harder for GHQ to control
STIs and also caused an increase in rapes by GIs, from an average of 40 a
day before the SCAP order to an estimated 330 per day immediately
after.
During the Korean War
During the Korean War,
the South Korean military institutionalized a "special comfort unit"
similar to the one used by the Japanese military during World War II,
kidnapping and pressing several North Korean women into sexual slavery.
Until recently, very little was known about this apart from testimonies
of retired generals and soldiers who had fought in the war. In February
2002, Korean sociologist Kim Kwi-ok wrote the first scholarly work on Korea's comfort women through official records.
The South Korean "comfort" system was organized around three
operations. First, there were "special comfort units" called T'uksu
Wiandae (특수위안대, 特殊慰安隊), which operated from seven different stations.
Second, there were mobile units of comfort women that visited barracks.
Third, there were prostitutes who worked in private brothels that were
hired by the military. Although it is still not clear how recruitment of
these comfort women were organized in the South, South Korean agents
were known to have kidnapped some of the women from the North.
According to anthropologist Chunghee Sarah Soh,
the South Korean military's use of comfort women has produced
"virtually no societal response," despite the country's women's
movement's support for Korean comfort women within the Japanese
military. Both Kim and Soh argue that this system is a legacy of
Japanese colonialism, as many of Korea's army leadership were trained by
the Japanese military. Both the Korean and Japanese military referred
to these comfort women as "military supplies" in official documents and
personal memoirs. The South Korean armed forces also used the same
arguments as the Japanese military to justify the use of comfort women,
viewing them as a "necessary social evil" that would raise soldiers'
morale and prevent rape.
Present day
Official estimates of individuals in sexual slavery worldwide vary. In 2001 the International Organization for Migration estimated 400,000, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimated 700,000 and UNICEF estimated 1.75 million.
Africa
In Africa the colonial powers abolished slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, in areas outside their jurisdiction, such as the Mahdist empire in Sudan,
the practice continued to thrive. Institutional slavery has been banned
worldwide, but there are numerous reports of women sex slaves in areas
without effective government control, such as Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, northern Uganda, Congo, Niger, and Mauritania. 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.
In April 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 female students from Chibok,
Borno, a state of Nigeria. More than 50 of them soon escaped, but the
remainder have not been released. Instead Shekau, who has a reward of $7
million offered by the United States Department of State since June 2013 for information leading to his capture, announced his intention of selling them into slavery.
Americas
The San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2006 that in the 21st century, women, mostly from South America, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, are trafficked into the United States for the purposes of sexual slavery. A 2006 ABC News story stated that, contrary to existing misconceptions, American citizens may also be coerced into sex slavery.
In 2001 the United States State Department estimated that 50,000
to 100,000 women and girls are trafficked each year into the United
States. In 2003, the State Department report estimated that a total of
18,000 to 20,000 individuals were trafficked into the United States for
either forced labor or sexual exploitation. The June 2004 report
estimated the total trafficked annually at between 14,500 and 17,500.
The Bush administration set up 42 Justice Department task forces and
spent more than $150 million on attempts to reduce human trafficking.
However, in the seven years since the law was passed, the administration
has identified only 1,362 victims of human trafficking brought into the
United States since 2000, nowhere near the 50,000 or more per year the
government had estimated.
The Girl’s Education & Mentoring Services (GEMS), an
organization based in New York, claims that the majority of girls in the
sex trade were abused as children. Poverty and a lack of education play
major roles in the lives of many women in the sex industry.
According to a report conducted by the University of
Pennsylvania, anywhere from 100,000 up to 300,000 American children at
any given time may be at risk of exploitation due to factors such as
drug use, homelessness, or other factors connected with increased risk
for commercial sexual exploitation.
However, the report emphasized, "The numbers presented in these
exhibits do not, therefore, reflect the actual number of cases of CSEC
in the United States but, rather, what we estimate to be the number of
children ‘at risk’ of commercial sexual exploitation."
The 2010 Trafficking in Persons report described the United
States as, "a source, transit, and destination country for men, women,
and children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced
labor, debt bondage, and forced prostitution."
Sexual slavery in the United States may occur in multiple forms and in
multiple venues. Sex trafficking in the United States may be present in
Asian massage parlors, Mexican cantina bars, residential brothels, or street-based pimp-controlled
prostitution. The anti-trafficking community in the United States is
debating the extent of sexual slavery. Some groups argue that
exploitation is inherent in the act of commercial sex,
while other groups take a stricter approach to defining sexual slavery,
considering an element of force, fraud or coercion to be necessary for
sex slavery to exist.
The prostitutes in illegal massage parlors may be forced to work out of apartment complexes for many hours a day.
Many clients may not realize that some of the women who work in these
massage sex parlors have actually been forced into prostitution.
The women may initially be lured into the US under false pretenses. In
huge debt to their 'owners', they are forced to earn enough to
eventually "buy" their freedom. In some cases women who have been sex trafficked may be forced to undergo plastic surgery or abortions. A chapter in The Slave Next Door
(2009) reports that human trafficking and sexual enslavement are not
limited to any specific location or social class. It concludes that
individuals in society need to be alert to report suspicious behavior,
because the psychological and physical abuse occurs which can often
leave a victim unable to escape on their own.
In 2000 Congress created the Victims of Trafficking and Violence
Protection Act with tougher punishments for sex traffickers. It provides
for the possibility for former sex slaves to obtain a T-1 visa. To obtain the visa women must, "prove they were enslaved by 'force, fraud or coercion'." The visa allows former victims of sex trafficking to stay in the United States for 3 years and then apply for a green card.
The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) has been suspected of trafficking underage women across state lines, as well as across the US–Canada and US–Mexico borders, for the purpose of sometimes involuntary plural marriage and sexual abuse. The FLDS is suspected by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
of having trafficked more than 30 under-age girls from Canada to the
United States between the late 1990s and 2006 to be entered into
polygamous marriages.
RCMP spokesman Dan Moskaluk said of the FLDS's activities: "In essence,
it's human trafficking in connection with illicit sexual activity." According to the Vancouver Sun,
it's unclear whether or not Canada's anti-human trafficking statute can
be effectively applied against the FLDS's pre-2005 activities, because
the statute may not be able to be applied retroactively.
An earlier three-year-long investigation by local authorities in
British Columbia into allegations of sexual abuse, human trafficking,
and forced marriages by the FLDS resulted in no charges, but did result
in legislative change.
Former FLDS members have also alleged that children belonging to the
sect were forced to perform sexual acts as children upon older men while
being unable to leave. This has been described by numerous former
members as sexual slavery, and was reported as such by the Sydney Morning Herald, One former resident of Yearning for Zion, Kathleen Mackert, stated: "I was required to perform oral sex on my father when I was seven, and it escalated from there."
Asia
Central and West Asia
The Trafficking in Persons Report of 2007 from the US Department of State says that sexual slavery exists in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, where women and children may be trafficked from the post-Soviet states, Eastern Europe, Far East, Africa, South Asia or other parts of the Middle East.
According to media reports from late 2014 the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was selling Yazidis and Christian women as slaves.] According to Haleh Esfandiari of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars,
after ISIL militants have captured an area "[t]hey usually take the
older women to a makeshift slave market and try to sell them."
In mid-October 2014 the U.N. estimated that 5,000 to 7,000 Yazidi women
and children were abducted by ISIL and sold into slavery.
In the digital magazine Dabiq, ISIL claimed religious justification for enslaving Yazidi
women whom they consider to be from a heretical sect. ISIL claimed that
the Yazidi are idol worshipers and their enslavement part of the old shariah practice of spoils of war. ISIL appealed to apocalyptic beliefs
and "claimed justification by a Hadith that they interpret as
portraying the revival of slavery as a precursor to the end of the
world." In late September 2014, 126 Islamic scholars from around the Muslim world signed an open letter to the Islamic State's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, rejecting his group's interpretations of the Qur'an and hadith to justify its actions. The letter accuses the group of instigating fitna—sedition—by instituting slavery under its rule in contravention of the anti-slavery consensus of the Islamic scholarly community. In late 2014 ISIL released a pamphlet on the treatment of female slaves. In January 2015, further rules for sex slaves were announced.
Selling women and children still occurs in the Middle East. "IS
[Islamic State] offers women and underage children in a kind of virtual
slave market with for-sale photos. ... The transfer of money, as the
reporter discovered, takes place through a liaison office in Turkey".
Yazidi women have also reported being raped and used as sexual slave by
members of ISIS. In November 2015 it was reported that "around 2,000
women and girls are still being bought and sold in ISIS-controlled
areas. The young become sex slaves and older women are beaten and used
as house slaves, according to survivors and accounts from ISIS
militants".
South Asia
In 2007, the Ministry of Women and Child Development estimated that there are around 2.8 million sex workers in India, with 35 percent of them entering the trade before the age of 18 years. The number of prostitutes has also doubled in the recent decade. One news article states that an estimated 200,000 Nepalese girls have been trafficked to red light areas of India. Nepalese women and girls, especially virgins, are reportedly favored in India because of their fair skin and young looks.
One report estimates that every year between 5,000 and 7,000 Nepalese
girls are trafficked into the red-light districts in Indian cities, and
that many of the girls may only be 9 or 10 years old.
In Pakistan, young girls have been sold by their families to
big-city brothel owners. 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.
Cases have also been reported where wives and sisters have been sold to
brothels to raise money for gambling, drinking or drug addictions. Sex
slaves are reportedly 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, some for many years. Beardless young boys in Afghanistan may be sold as bacha bazi for use in dancing and prostitution (pederasty), and are sometimes valued in tens of thousands of dollars.
East and Southeast Asia
In
January 2010, the Supreme Court of India stated that India is "becoming
a hub" for large-scale child prostitution rackets. It suggested setting
up of a special investigating agency to tackle the growing problem.
An article about the Rescue Foundation in New Internationalist
magazine states that "according to Save the Children India, clients now
prefer 10- to 12-year-old girls". The same article attributes the
rising number of prostitutes believed to have contracted HIV
in India’s brothels as a factor in India becoming the country with the
second-largest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world,
behind South Africa.
In Thailand, the Health System Research Institute reported in
2005 that children in prostitution make up 40% of Thailand's
prostitutes. It said that a proportion of prostitutes over the age of 18, including foreign nationals mostly from Myanmar, China's Yunnan province, Laos and Cambodia, are also in some state of forced sexual servitude. In
1996, the police in Bangkok estimated that there were at least 5,000
Russian prostitutes working in Thailand, many of whom had arrived
through networks controlled by Russian gangs.
The Tourism Police Bureau in 1997 stated that there were 500 Chinese
and 200 European women in prostitution in Bangkok, many of whom entered
Thailand illegally, often through Burma and Laos. Earlier reports,
however, suggest different figures. (Police Colonel Sanit Meephan,
deputy chief of Tourism Police Bureau, "Thailand popular haunt for
foreign prostitutes", The Nation, 15 January 1997)
Part of the challenge in quantifying and eliminating sexual
slavery in Thailand and Asia generally is the high rate of police
corruption in the region. There are documented cases where Thai and
other area law enforcement officials worked with human traffickers, even
to the extent of returning escaped child sex slaves to brothels.
Ethnic Rohingya women are kidnapped by Myanmar military and used as sex slave.
Many Rohingya women were detained at a human trafficking syndicate
transit camp in Padang Besar, Thailand, were treated like sex slaves.
Europe
De Wallen red-light district in Amsterdam. Most of the trafficked girls and women come from central and eastern Europe.
In the Netherlands,
the Bureau of the Dutch Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings in
2005 estimated that there are from 1,000 to 7,000 trafficking victims a
year. Most police investigations relate to legal sex businesses, with
all sectors of prostitution being well represented, but with window
brothels being particularly over-represented.
Dutch news site Expatica reported that in 2008, there were 809
registered trafficking victims in the Netherlands; out of those 763 were
women and at least 60 percent of them were reportedly forced to work in
the sex industry. Of reported victims, those from Hungary were all female and all forced into prostitution.
In Germany, the trafficking of women from Eastern Europe
is often organized by people from that same region. German authorities
identified 676 sex-trafficking victims in 2008, compared with 689 in
2007. The German Federal Police Office BKA
reported in 2006 a total of 357 completed investigations of human
trafficking, with 775 victims. Thirty-five percent of the suspects were
Germans born in Germany and 8% were German citizens born outside
Germany.
In Greece,
according to NGO estimates in 2008, there may be a total 13,000–14,000
trafficking victims of all types in the country at any given time. Major
countries of origin for trafficking victims brought into Greece include
Nigeria, Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, Albania, Moldova, Romania and
Belarus.
In Switzerland,
the police estimated in 2006 that there may be between 1,500 and 3,000
victims of all types of human trafficking. The organizers and their
victims generally come from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine,
Moldova, Lithuania, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Thailand and
Cambodia, and, to a lesser extent, Africa.
In Belgium,
in 2007, prosecutors handled a total of 418 trafficking cases,
including 219 economic exploitation and 168 sexual exploitation cases.
In the same year, the federal judicial police handled 196 trafficking
files, compared with 184 in 2006. In 2007 the police arrested 342
persons for smuggling and trafficking-related crimes. A recent report by RiskMonitor foundation estimated that 70% of the prostitutes who work in Belgium are from Bulgaria.
In Austria, Vienna has the largest number of reported trafficking
cases, although trafficking is also a problem in urban centers such as
Graz, Linz, Salzburg, and Innsbruck. The NGO Lateinamerikanische Frauen
in Oesterreich–Interventionsstelle fuer Betroffene des Frauenhandels
(LEFOE-IBF) reported assisting 108 victims of all types of human
trafficking in 2006, down from 151 in 2005.
In Spain, in 2007, officials identified 1,035 sex trafficking victims and 445 labor trafficking victims.
