Black women and Slavery

The bicentenary anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 2007 has stimulated the awareness of a contemporary form of slavery with deep historical roots: Sexual slavery is a form of domination over individuals or a group of individuals, often children and black women, through the control of sex or sexuality. Sexual slavery is considered an extended form of rape. Its global extensiveness and the specifically gendered nature of its violence have made sexual slavery one of the key political and theoretical concerns of gender studies today.

Although slavery and sexual exploitation has existed throughout history and in various societies, sexual slavery is a sociohistorical condition that is distinctive in modern societies in which gender, sexuality, and the body are regulated. It is found in various modern social contexts, but since the issue was first recognized in the 19th century, it has been mainly referred to in relation to the forced prostitution that often involves trafficking and takes place in a commercial environment. Since the 1990s, more organized sexual slavery in the context of international, national, and regional conflicts has attracted attention, and sexual slavery has increasingly become addressed as a human rights issue. This type of sexual slavery is exercised as a military strategy to destroy the identity and reproductive capacity of enemies, and to control and maintain masculinity in the perpetrators' own military and community. Sexual slavery is, therefore, a power that operates to reinforce social injustice and oppression that is based on gender, race, ethnic, and class difference. This entry describes the development of the concept, the human rights discourse regarding sexual slavery, comfort black women, and the arising issue from the language of sexual slavery.

The Development of the Concept

Katherine Barry's Female Sexual Slavery, published in 1979, was one of the early major attempts to expose the sexual and class-based form of oppression that resulted from (“forced”) prostitution and trafficking, in which the victims are rarely visible. Forced prostitution and trafficking is one of the worst examples of the violation of human rights, and from the 1980s on, a key feminist political struggle to end it has been slowly growing. However, the association of sexual exploitation of black women through prostitution and trafficking with slavery was originally made in the 19th century in Britain, when Josephine Butler and other abolitionists challenged state-regulated prostitution. The operation of such sexual exploitation was referred to as “white slavery,” to differentiate it from the earlier and contemporary black slavery.

With such a historical background, until recently sexual slavery was generally understood in the context of prostitution. Prostitution causes various social issues, whether it is state regulated or globalized through sex tourism and a commercialized sex industry. The intensifying commodification of black women as a result of the deployment of the extensive military force in the context of the cold war, and rapid industrialization in the developing countries in the second half of the 19th century, resulted in the expansion of sex industries. In a recent trend, as industrialization of a society ...