The International Crimes of Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Feminist Critique

Abstract

Existing from ancient times to today, slavery and the slave trade have spared neither females nor males, children nor adults. Sexualized violence through specific practices, such as inter alia concubinage and enslavement of eunuchs in harems, forced breeding of wenches and bucks, and the keeping of ‘fancy girls’ and bardaj boys, were integral to slavery and slave trades across the globe. This chapter offers a critical feminist lens to uncover and examine the sexual practices and sexualized violence inflicted upon the subjects of the 1926 Slavery Convention: the slaves. Examining the historic, gendered, and sexualized institutions of slavery and the slave trade facilitates a more complete understanding of the Convention’s legal definitions. Similar scrutiny of slave traders’ and slave owners’ economic needs and social customs further deduce the definitional scope of these crimes. The authors posit that the 1926 Slavery Convention’s definitions encompassed diverse gendered, sexualized norms that historically have permeated slavery and the slave trade, while observing the misguided use and desuetude of the crimes of slavery and the slave trade in the statutes of contemporary international judicial mechanisms. The authors conclude by advancing the application of distilled legal precepts to redress the sexually saturated and gender-based practices of slavery and the slave trade that persist today.

This is a draft of a chapter that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the forthcoming book, Gender and International Criminal Law, edited by Indira Rosenthal, Valerie Oosterveld and Susana SáCouto, due for publication in 2022.