History of sexual slavery in the United States
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The history of
Early Americas
It is contended by some that as early as the 1490s Christopher Columbus had established trade in sex slaves on Hispaniola, which included sex slaves as young as nine years old.[1][2][3] Within 25 years of being colonized, the Native population of Hispaniola drastically declined, due to the effects of enslavement, massacre, and infectious disease.[4]
However, others consider this contention to have arisen from a misreading of primary documents. Columbus does mention the selling of slaves, but as atrocities of a rebelling faction. He continues with this comment, "I declare solemnly that a great number of men have been to the Indies, who did not deserve baptism in the eyes of God or men, and who are now returning thither.” [5]
Under chattel slavery
From the beginning of African slavery in the North American colonies, slaves were often viewed as property, rather than people. 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.
Slave breeding was the attempt by a slave-owner to increase the reproduction of his slaves for profit.[6] It included forced sexual relations between male and female slaves, encouraging slave pregnancies, sexual relations between master and slave to produce slave children, and favoring female slaves who had many children.[7] The historian E. Franklin Frazier, in his book The Negro Family, stated that "there were masters who, without any regard for the preferences of their slaves, mated their human chattel as they did their stock." Ex-slave Maggie Stenhouse remarked, "Durin' slavery there were stockmen. They was weighed and tested. A man would rent the stockman and put him in a room with some young women he wanted to raise children from."[8]
Concubine slaves were the only female slaves who commanded a higher price than skilled male slaves.[9]
In Louisiana
The plaçage system developed from the predominance of white men among early colonial populations, who took women as consorts from Native Americans and enslaved Africans. In this period there was a shortage of European women, as the colonies were dominated in the early day by male explorers and colonists. Given the harsh conditions in Louisiana, persuading women to follow the men was not easy. France sent females convicted along with their debtor husbands, and in 1719, deported 209 women felons "who were of a character to be sent to the French settlement in Louisiana."[10] France also relocated young women and girls known as King's Daughters (French: filles du roi) to the colonies of Canada and Louisiana for marriage.
Through warfare and raids, Native American women were often captured to be traded, sold, or taken as wives. At first, the colony generally imported male Africans to use as slave labor because of the heavy work of clearing to develop plantations. Over time, it also imported African female slaves. Marriage between the races was forbidden according to the Code Noir of the eighteenth century, but interracial sex continued. The upper class European men during this period often did not marry until their late twenties or early thirties. Premarital sex with an intended white bride, especially if she was of high rank, was not permitted socially.
White male colonists, often the younger sons of noblemen, military men, and planters, who needed to accumulate some wealth before they could marry, took women of color as consorts before marriage. Merchants and administrators also followed this practice if they were wealthy enough.
Post-emancipation
After the enslaved people were emancipated, many states passed
The Chinese
A few captives from
White slavery
By the 19th century, most of America's cities had a designated, legally protected area of prostitution. Increased urbanization and young women entering the workforce led to greater flexibility in courtship without supervision. It is in this changing social sphere that the panic over "white slavery" began. This term referred to women being coerced, lured, or kidnapped for the purposes of prostitution.[18][19]
Numerous communities appointed
According to historian Mark Thomas Connelly, "a group of books and pamphlets appeared announcing a startling claim: a pervasive and depraved conspiracy was at large in the land, brutally trapping and seducing American girls into lives of enforced prostitution, or 'white slavery.' These white slave narratives, or white-slave tracts, began to circulate around 1909."[21]: 114 Such narratives often portrayed innocent girls "victimized by a huge, secret and powerful conspiracy controlled by foreigners", as they were drugged or imprisoned and forced into prostitution.[21]: 116
This excerpt from The War on the White Slave Trade was written by the United States District Attorney in Chicago:
One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards "white slavery" in places of this character.[22]
Suffrage activists, especially Harriet Burton Laidlaw[23] and Rose Livingston, worked in New York City's Chinatown and in other cities to rescue young white and Chinese girls from forced prostitution, and helped pass the Mann Act to make interstate sex trafficking a federal crime.[20] Livingston publicly discussed her past as a prostitute and claimed to have been abducted and developed a drug problem as a sex slave in a Chinese man's home, narrowly escaped and experienced a Christian conversion narrative.[24][25] Other groups like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and Hull House focused on children of prostitutes and poverty in community life while trying to pass protective legislation. The American Purity Alliance also supported the Mann Act.[22] In New York City, the Travelers Aid Society of New York provided social services to women at train stations and piers in order to prevent trafficking.[26]
In 1910, the US Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910 (better known as the Mann Act), which made it a felony to transport women across state borders for the purpose of "prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, immorality, and human trafficking particularly where it was trafficking for the purposes of prostitution, but the ambiguity of "immoral purpose" effectively criminalized interracial marriage and banned single women from crossing state borders for morally wrong acts. As more women were being trafficked from foreign countries, the US began passing immigration acts to curtail aliens from entering the country. Several acts such as the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and Immigration Act of 1924 were passed to prevent emigrants from Europe and Asia from entering the United States. Following the banning of immigrants during the 1920s, human trafficking was not considered a major issue until the 1990s.[27][19]
The 1921 Convention set new goals for international efforts to stem human trafficking, primarily by giving the anti-trafficking movement further official recognition, as well as a bureaucratic apparatus to research and fight the problem. The Advisory Committee on the Traffic of Women and Children was a permanent advisory committee of the League. Its members were nine countries, and several non-governmental organizations. An important development was the implementation of a system of annual reports of member countries. Member countries formed their own centralized offices to track and report on trafficking of women and children.[20] The advisory committee also worked to expand its research and intervention program beyond the United States and Europe. In 1929, a need to expand into the Near East (Asia Minor), the Middle East and Asia was acknowledged. An international conference of central authorities in Asia was planned for 1937, but no further action was taken during the late 1930s.[28]
Sex trafficking
Act 18 U.S.C. § 1591, or the Commercial Sex Act, the US makes it illegal to recruit, entice, obtain, provide, move or harbor a person or to benefit from such activities knowing that the person will be caused to engage in commercial sex acts where the person is under 18 or where force, fraud or coercion exists.[29][30]
Under the Bush Administration, fighting sex slavery worldwide and domestically became a priority with an average of $100 million spent per year, which substantially outnumbers the amount spent by other countries. Before President Bush took office, Congress passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA). The TVPA strengthened services to victims of violence, law enforcements ability to reduce violence against women and children, and education against human trafficking. Also specified in the TVPA was a mandate to collect funds for the treatment of sex trafficking victims that provided them with shelter, food, education, and financial grants. Internationally, the TVPA set standards that governments of other countries must follow in order to receive aid from the U.S. to fight human trafficking. Once George W. Bush took office in 2001, restricting sex trafficking became one of his primary humanitarian efforts. The Attorney General under President Bush, John Ashcroft, strongly enforced the TVPA. The Act was subsequently renewed in 2004, 2006, and 2008. It established two stipulations an applicant has to meet in order to receive the benefits of a T-Visa. First, a trafficked victim must prove/admit to being trafficked and second must submit to prosecution of his or her trafficker. In 2011, Congress failed to re-authorize the Act. The State Department publishes an annual Trafficking in Persons Report, which examines the progress that the U.S. and other countries have made in destroying human trafficking businesses, arresting the kingpins, and rescuing the victims.[31][32][33]
See also
- Enslaved women's resistance in the United States and Caribbean
- Marriage of enslaved people (United States)
- Children of the plantation
References
- ^ Kasum, Eric (11 October 2010). "Columbus Day? True Legacy: Cruelty and Slavery". HuffPost. Retrieved 28 May 2018.
- ^ MacGuill, Dan (26 May 2018). "Did Christopher Columbus Seize, Sell, and Export Sex Slaves? – True – A Facebook meme accurately describes some of Columbus's most brutal practices in the Caribbean". Snopes. Retrieved 26 May 2018.
- ^ Christopher Columbus: his life, his work, his remains as revealed by original printed and manuscript records. 1903.
- ^ "Hispaniola | Genocide Studies Program". gsp.yale.edu. Retrieved 2022-12-29.
- ^ Christopher Columbus, “Letter of the Admiral to the (quondam) nurse of the Prince John, written near the end of the year 1500,” Select Letters of Christopher Columbus (London: Hakluyt Society, 1870), p.165.
- ^ Marable, Manning, How capitalism underdeveloped Black America: problems in race, political economy, and society South End Press, 2000, p 72
- ^ Marable, ibid, p 72
- ^ Work Projects Administration, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 6, Kessinger Publishing, 2004, p. 154.
- JSTOR 2692741.
- ^ Katy F. Morlas, "La Madame et la Mademoiselle," graduate thesis in history, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2003
- ISBN 1-4068-0431-2.
or among Chinese residents as their concubines, or to be sold for export to Singapore, San Francisco, or Australia.
- ^ Albert S. Evans (1873). "Chapter 12". A la California. Sketch of Life in the Golden State. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft and Company. Archived from the original on 2008-05-11.
- ^ Rogers, Jacquie (2010-08-25). "Unusual Historicals: Tragic Tales: Chinese Slave Girls of the Barbary Coast". Unusual Historicals. Retrieved 2022-12-29.
- ^ Ahmad, p. 47–48.
- ^ Ahmad, p.51.
- ^ a b Heap, p.34.
- ISBN 0-8061-1277-8.
- ^ Matsubara, Hiroyuki (2006). "The 1910s Anti-Prostitution Movement and the Transformation of American Political Culture". The Japanese Journal of American Studies. 17.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-252-09100-1.
- ^ a b c Brian K. Landsberg. Major Acts of Congress. Macmillan Reference USA: The Gale Group, 2004. 251–253. Print
- ^ ISBN 9781469650142.
- ^ a b Bell, Ernest Albert (1910). ... Fighting the traffic in young girls; or, War on the white slave trade; a complete and detailed account of the shameless traffic in young girls . University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. [Chicago? : G.S. Ball.
- ^ "We've moved". oasis.lib.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2022-12-29.
- ^ Lui, Mary Ting Yi (1 September 2009). "Saving young girls from Chinatown: white slavery and woman suffrage, 1910–1920". Journal of the History of Sexuality.
- ^ Massotta, Jodie. Decades of Reform: Prostitutes, Feminists, and the War on White Slavery Archived 2014-07-15 at the Wayback Machine. Diss. University of Vermont, 2013. Print.
- . Ph.D. Diss., Stony Brook University.
- ^ Doezema, Jo. "Loose women or lost women? The re-emergence of the myth of white slavery in contemporary discourses of trafficking in women." Gender issues 18.1 (1999): 23–50.
- ^ Elizabeth Faue. The Emergence of Modern America(1990 to 1923). Encyclopedia of American History, 2003. pp. 169–170. Print
- ^ "Stop Sex Trafficking". Archived from the original on 2011-04-27. Retrieved 2010-03-10.
- ^ "Victims Of Trafficking And Violence Protection Act of 2000" (PDF).
- ^ Soderlund, Gretchen. "Running from the rescuers: new US crusades against sex trafficking and the rhetoric of abolition." nwsa Journal 17.3 (2005): 64–87.
- ^ Feingold, David A. "Human trafficking." Foreign Policy (2005): 26–32.
- ^ Horning, A. et al. (2014). Trafficking in Persons Report: A Game of Risk. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 38(3).