Sexual slavery
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Category:Slavery |
Sexual slavery is a special case of slavery which includes various different practices:
- forced prostitution
- single-owner sexual slavery
- ritual slavery, sometimes associated with traditional religious practices
- slavery for primarily non-sexual purposes where sex is common or permissible
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. Female slaves are at highest risk of sexual abuse and sexual slavery.
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). This should not be confused with the meaning of the term as defined in this article, which refers specifically to unwilling slavery.
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[edit] Modern-day sexual slavery
[edit] Forced prostitution
Forced prostitution is a form of sexual slavery that is often directed at immigrants to Western and Asian countries. Often the "owners" of these people will confiscate passports and/or money in order to make them completely dependent. This practice, also known as sex trafficking or human trafficking, is illegal in most countries.
Human trafficking is not the same as people smuggling. A smuggler will facilitate illegal entry into a country for a fee, but on arrival at their destination, the smuggled person is free; the trafficking victim is enslaved. Traffickers use coercive tactics including deception, fraud, intimidation, isolation, threat and use of physical force, debt bondage or even force-feeding with drugs of abuse to control their victims. Women are typically recruited with promises of good, legal jobs in other countries or provinces, or are tricked into a false 'marriage', and, lacking better options at home, agree to migrate. Traffickers arrange the travel and job placements, the women are escorted to their destinations and delivered to the employers. Upon reaching their destinations, some women learn that they have been deceived about the nature of the work they will do; most have been lied to about the financial arrangements and conditions of their employment; and all find themselves in coercive and abusive situations and kept in a financial situation that they are stuck in a form of debt bondage from which escape is both difficult and dangerous.
A US Government report[1] published in 2003, estimates that 800,000-900,000 people worldwide are trafficked across borders each year, the majority to Southeast Asia, Japan, Europe and North America. The trafficking of women has also been recorded (in lower numbers) in South Asia and the Middle East and from Latin America into the United States. Since the mid 1990s, with the opening up of the former Soviet Union, the end of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the opening up of East and South East Asia, there has been an increase in the trafficking of human beings. See the main article on the trafficking of human beings.
A recent development should be noted that proponents of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in the United States, and Sweden's Act On Prohibiting The Purchase Of Sexual Services seek 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.[2] Prostitute 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.[3]
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.
[edit] Sexual slavery in the United States
In 2002, the US Department of State repeated an earlier CIA estimate[4] that each year, about 50,000 women and children are brought against their will to the United States for sexual exploitation.[5]. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that "Here and abroad, the victims of trafficking toil under inhuman conditions -- in brothels, sweatshops, fields and even in private homes."[6]
[edit] Sexual slavery in Africa
Sex slavery is a problem in some parts of Africa. In many African communities, marrying women requires paying a wedding dowry to her family, which lessens the perceived barrier to female slavery. The colonial powers abolished slavery in the 19th century, but in areas outside their jurisdiction, such as the Mahdist empire in Sudan, the practice continued to thrive. Nowadays, 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, Liberia, Sierra Leone, northern Uganda and Kongo. In Zimbabwe, the government is believed to train its youth militia, the Border Gezi Youth, in the use of rape as a tactic.
In Niger[7] and Mauritania[8], sexual slavery also exists.
In Ghana, Togo, and Benin, a form of religious prostitution known as trokosi or ritual servitude keeps thousands of girls and women in traditional shrines against their will, forcing them to act as "wives of the gods," the shrine priests performing the sexual function in place of the gods. (The Trokosi System, Mark Wisdom, FESLIM--Fetish Slaves Liberation Movement, PO Box 21, Adidome, Ghana, 2001.) This can be compared with the devadasi system in India.
[edit] Sexual slavery in the Middle East
In the contemporary Middle East, sexual slavery is uncommon. However, trafficking of women does exist there, from Iran, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf states[9]. Israel and Turkey also have a significant sex trade-much of it involving women from Eastern Europe.
[edit] Sexual slavery in the past
[edit] Sexual slavery in North America
In the mid-19th century in the U.S., there was a white slavery scare which suggested that large numbers of white women were being kidnapped and forced into prostitution. The prevalence of this practice was greatly exaggerated due to xenophobia, and this phenomenon is generally regarded today as having been an example of a moral panic.
In fact, at that time, the US victims of sexual slavery were overwhelmingly women of African descent, held as slaves, often purchased primarily for sexual exploitation. One related, but unverified story tells of one such girl, purchased as a sexual slave when she was fourteen, is told in "Celia, A Slave," by Melton A. Mclaurin, and such practice is also widely referred to in other literature discussing the era, for instance Roots by Alex Haley. Frederick Douglass, in his autobiography, described the sale of female slaves openly advertised for sexual purposes at slave auctions in the 19th century United States. According to John A. Morone's book Hellfire Nation, slaveowners in the American South openly admitted to practicing sexual slavery.
[edit] Sexual slavery in East and Southeast Asia during World War II
During World War II, hundreds of thousands of mostly Asian women were recruited into serving the Japanese army as prostitutes, euphemistically named "comfort women", in the wartime brothels of Asia during the Japanese occupation of China, Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations.
According to Nihon University professor Ikuhiko Hata, the women working in the licensed pleasure quarter were 40% Japanese, 20% Koreans, 10% Chinese, with others making up the remaining 30%.[1]
Some of them argue that they were forced into sexual slavery by Japan and raped dozens of times daily by Japanese soldiers, and have faced lives of enduring shame.
[edit] Sexual slavery in the Middle East
Slave trade, including trade of sex slaves occured fluctuatingly in certain regions in the Middle East up until the twentieth century. These slaves came largely from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caucasus.
[edit] Further reading
- Lal, K. S. Muslim Slave System in Medieval India (1994), chapter XII: "Sex Slavery" [10] ISBN 81-85689-67-9
[edit] See also
[edit] External references
- Sex trade's reliance on forced labour - BBC
- A modern slave's brutal odyssey – BBC
- 'Bosnia: Sex Slave Recounts Her Ordeal - Institute for War & Peace Reporting
- 'Asia's sex trade is 'slavery' - BBC
- 'Iran's Sex Slaves Suffer Hideously Under Mullahs - Iranfocus'
- 'Streets of despair - The Observer
- ‘They said I wasn’t human but something that can be bought’ – The Times
- ‘Mine for £1,300: Ileana, the teenage sex slave ready to work in London’ – The Sunday Telegraph
- eText of Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers (1907) by Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell, at Project Gutenberg. A work about "Oriental brothel slavery on the Pacific Coast".
- Human Rights Abuses Affecting Trafficked Women in Israeli's Sex Industry - Amnesty International
- Sex slaves and the U.S. military - Army Times
- Womens Issues and Worldwide Sex Slavery Trafficking
- Traditionalist Islamic View on Sex Slavery
- Celia, a slave (ISBN 0-380-71935-5)
- Roots (ISBN 0-440-17464-3)
- The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade, by Victor Malarek. (ISBN 1-55970-735-6)
- Prostitution Research
- The "Teen Sex Slave" Scams -- ABC's Primetime Fakery, Debbie Nathan
[edit] Quality Organizations
- World-wide umbrella organization (Coalition Against Trafficking in Women - CATW)
- Sanlaap Organization in Kolkata, India
- Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST) in Los Angeles, CA
- Polaris, based in Tokyo and Washington DC
- Amnesty International
- Sex Workers Outreach Project
- Prostitutes Education Network
- [http://www.ecmafrica.org --Every Child Ministries-Slave Children
