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. See
ancient Rome's law on rape as an example. Male intercourse with a slave was not considered adultery by either society.
Asia Concubinage and sexual slavery was highly popular before the early 20th century all over
East Asia. The main functions of concubinage for men was for pleasure and producing additional heirs, whereas for women the relationship could provide financial security. Children of concubines had lower rights in account to inheritance, which was regulated by the
Dishu system. Slavery was
commonly practiced in ancient China. During the
Chinese rule of Vietnam,
Nanyue girls were sold as sex slaves to the Chinese. A trade developed where the native girls of southern China were enslaved and brought north to the Chinese. Natives in
Fujian and
Guizhou were sources of slaves as well.
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, some Portuguese visitors and their
South Asian
lascar and African crew members would engage 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, Dutch male prisoners were executed. Surviving women and children were enslaved, and a number of them were sold to Chinese soldiers to become their wives or concubines. A teenage daughter of the Dutch missionary
Antonius Hambroek became a concubine to Koxinga. 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
India, in what was then known as the 'Yellow Slave Traffic'. There was also a network of prostitutes from
Eastern Europe being
trafficked to India,
Ceylon, Singapore at around the same time, where they provided sexual services to European soldiers and civilians. 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
India to serve as prostitutes and sexually serviced men from a variety of races, including Chinese, Europeans, native Southeast Asians, and others. 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 remitted, 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 visited 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
Western men were the second-best clients, while the native men were the best and fastest to have sex with. During
World War II,
Imperial 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 maintain that Japan and Korea sought neither the legal recognition of their claim nor the revision of Japanese history textbooks.
Middle East Slave trade, including trade of sex slaves, fluctuated in certain regions in the Middle East up until the 20th century. In ancient times, two sources for concubines were permitted under an Islamic regime. Primarily, non-Muslim women taken as prisoners of war were made concubines as happened after the
Battle of the Trench, or in numerous later Caliphates. It was encouraged to
manumit slave women who rejected their initial faith and converted to Islam, or to bring them into
formal marriage. Victims of the Arab slave trade and/or prisoners of war captured in battle from non-Arab lands often ended up as concubine slaves in the
Arab World. These slaves came largely from
Sub-Saharan Africa (mainly
Zanj via the
Trans-Saharan slave trade,
Red Sea slave trade and
Indian Ocean slave trade) and Central Asia (mainly
Tartars via the
Crimean slave trade) and the Caucasus (mainly
Circassians via the
Circassian slave trade). In Muslim society in general,
monogamy was common because keeping multiple wives and concubines was not affordable for many households. The practice of keeping concubines was common in the Muslim upper class. Muslim rulers preferred having children with concubines because it helped them avoid the social and political complexities arising from marriage and kept their lineages separate from the other lineages in society. Keeping slave concubines was the norm for many royal muslim dynasties, from the royal
Abbasid harem of the
Abbasid Caliphate in the 9th-century until the harem of the
Khedive of Egypt in the 19th-century a thousand years later. The expansion of various Muslim dynasties resulted in acquisitions of concubines, through purchase from the slave trade, gifts from other rulers, and captives of war. To have a large number of concubines became a symbol of status. Almost all
Abbasid caliphs were born to concubines. The custom to have concubines was common in all Islamic dynasties until the abolition of slavery in the 20th-century. Similarly, the sultans of the
Ottoman Empire were often the son of a concubine. As a result, some individual concubines came to exercise a degree of influence over Ottoman politics. Some concubines developed social networks, and accumulated personal wealth, both of which allowed them to rise on social status. Many of the female slaves became concubines. The most famous of the harems of Al-Andalus was perhaps the harem of the
Caliph of Cordoba. The slaves of the Caliph were often European
saqaliba slaves trafficked from Eastern Europe, and the female saqaliba were usually placed in the harem. The harem could contain thousands of slave concubines; the harem of
Abd al-Rahman I consisted of 6,300 women. In the late Middle ages, Eastern European slaves were trafficked to the Middle East via the
Balkan slave trade and later via the Italian
Black Sea slave trade, in which female slaves could end up as concubines. The Crimean slave trade was one of the biggest suppliers of women to the
Ottoman Imperial Harem. The male
Mamluk aristocrats of
Ottoman Egypt, who themselves were often of white slave origin (often Circassian or from Georgia), preferred to marry women of similar ethnicity, while black slave women were used as domestic maids. 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. Ehud R. Toledano claims that female slaves from Africa were imported mainly for menial household labor than for reproduction; it was more common for female slaves from Caucasus to be used for reproduction, but also in their case their use as concubines have been exaggerated, and female slaves used in menial household jobs were not necessarily used for concubinage and childbearing. However, reproduction and sexual use was not synonymous in the Islamic world, since a man was allowed to use his female slave for sexual pleasure separate from reproduction; according to Islamic Law, a man had legal right to use contraceptives when having intercourse with his female slave in order to prevent offspring, which could result in his slave becoming an
Umm walad and thus no longer legal to sell. Aside from the female slaves used as concubines in private harems, female slaves were also used for prostitution. The Islamic Law formally prohibited prostitution. However, since Islamic Law allowed a man to have sexual intercourse with his female slave, prostitution was practiced by a pimp selling his female slave on the slave market to a client, who returned his ownership of her after 1–2 days on the pretext of discontent after having had intercourse with her, which was a legal and accepted method for prostitution in the Islamic world. This form of prostitution was practiced by for example
Ibn Batuta, who acquired several female slaves during his travels. When the Crimean slave trade was ended with the
Annexation of the Crimean Khanate by the Russian Empire in 1783, the
Circassian slave trade in so called
Circassian beauties continued as a separate trade until the end of the Ottoman Empire. The Circassian slave trade was heavily focused on girls, bought to become wives or concubines (sex slaves) for rich men. To buy a daughter-in-law was seen as a good alternative when arranging a marriage, since she was likely to become a humble wife, lacking both her own money as well as relatives and completely dependent upon her in-laws. The slave trade in primarily white girls intended for the harems attracted attention in the West. Attempting to suppress the practice,
another firman abolishing the trade of Circassians and
Georgians was issued in October 1854. The decree did not abolish slavery as such, only the import of new slaves. However, in March 1858, the Ottoman Governor of
Trapezunt informed the British Consul that the 1854 ban had been a temporary war time ban due to foreign pressure, and that he had been given orders to allow slave ships on the Black Sea passage on their way to Constantinople, and in December formal tax regulations were introduced, legitimizing the
Circassian slave trade again. Chattel slavery, and thus the existence of concubines, lasted longer in some Islamic states. During the 20th century, the
League of Nations founded a number of commissions,
Temporary Slavery Commission (1924–1926),
Committee of Experts on Slavery (1932) and the
Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery (1934–1939), which conducted international investigations of the institution of slavery and created international treaties to eradicate the institution worldwide. Slavery was eventually declared illegal at the global level in 1948 under the
United Nations'
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, followed by the
Ad Hoc Committee on Slavery (1950–1951). By this time, the Arab world was the only region in the world where chattel slavery was still legal.
Slavery in Saudi Arabia,
slavery in Yemen and
slavery in Dubai were abolished in 1962–1963, with
slavery in Oman following in 1970. Girls from Caucasus and the Circassian colonies in Anatolia were still trafficked to the Middle East in the 1920s; in 1928 at least 60 white slave girls were discovered for sexual purposes
in Kuwait. The report of the
Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery (ACE) about
Hadhramaut in Yemen in the 1930s described the existence of Chinese girls (
Mui tsai) trafficked from Singapore for enslavement as concubines,; the King and Imam of Yemen,
Ahmad bin Yahya (r. 1948–1962), were reported to have had a harem of 100 slave women, and Sultan
Said bin Taimur of Oman (r. 1932–1970) reportedly owned around 500 slaves, an estimated 150 of whom were women, who were kept at his palace at Salalah. In the 1940s, it was reported that Baluchi girls were shipped via Oman to the Arabian Peninsula, where they were popular as concubines since Caucasian girls were no longer available, and were sold for $350–450 in Mecca. The legal sex slave trade to the Middle East was ended with the abolition of
slavery in Saudi Arabia,
slavery in Dubai and
slavery in Oman in the 1960s.
White slavery , a controversial sculpture meant to depict modern western sexual enslavement In Anglophone 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, which was
a slave trade that was still ongoing in the early 20th-century. Circassians were identified as "white", and the slave trade of "white girls" to harems for sexual exploitation attracted attention in the international press and became an issue of concern for Western powers. In 1854, the Ottoman Empire banned the slave trade in "white women" with the
firman of 1854 after pressure from Great Britain and France. However, in March 1858 the Ottoman Governor of Trapezunt informed the British Consul that the 1854 ban had been a temporary wartime ban due to foreign pressure, and that he had been given orders to allow slave ships on the Black Sea to pass on their way to Constantinople, and in December formal tax regulations were introduced, legitimizing the Circassian slave trade again. There was a greater reluctance from Ottoman authorities to prohibit the
Circassian slave trade than the African slave trade, because the Circassian slave trade was regarded as in effect a marriage market, and it continued until the end of the Ottoman Empire (1922). 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. 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, after the exposure of the internationally infamous
White slave trade affair in 1880. 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. An international campaign against the white slave trade started in several countries in the West in the late 19th-century. Many of the procurers and prostitutes who had accompanied the British and French troops to Constantinople during the
Crimean war in the 1850s opened brothels in
Port Said in Egypt during the construction of the
Suez Canal, and these brothels were a destination for many victims of the
white slave trade, since they were under protection of the foreign consulates because of the Capitulatory privileges until 1937 and therefore protected from the police. In 1877 the first international congress for the abolition of prostitution took place in Geneva in Switzerland, followed by the foundation of the
International Association of Friends of Young Girls (German:
Internationale Verein Freundinnen junger Mädchen or FJM; French:
Amies de la jeune fille); after this, national associations to combat the white slave trade was gradually founded in a number of nations, such as the Freundinnenverein in Germany, the
National Vigilance Association in Britain and
Vaksamhet in Sweden. In 1884, the
Anglo-Egyptian Slave Trade Convention pressed upon Egypt by the British explicitly banned the sex slave trade of "white women" to
slavery in Egypt; this law was particularly targeted against the import of white women (mainly from
Caucasus and usually
Circassians via the
Circassian slave trade), which were the preferred choice for
harem concubines among the Egyptian
upper class. In 1899 the first international congress against white slave trade took place in London, where the
International Bureau for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children was founded to coordinate an international campaign, and as a result of the campaign of the movement suggestions was put forward on how to combat the white slave trade in Paris in 1902, which eventually resulted in the
International Agreement for the suppression of the White Slave Traffic in May 1904. 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.
United States From the beginning of African slavery in the North American colonies, the casual sexual abuse of African women and girls was common. It has been established by historians that white men raped enslaved African women, and this has also been supported by numerous genetic studies. As populations increased, slave women were taken advantage of by plantation owners, white overseers, planters' younger sons before and after they married, and other white men associated with the slaveholders. Some African slave women and girls 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, but it was fairly rare. White men had no obligation to trade anything for sex with black or mixed women. This left most of these women subject to the whims of white male pursuers. If another female caught his eye or the chosen women grew too old or too "difficult" in the minds of these white men these men could end the arrangement or continue the sexual contact without reward. The advancement of mixed-race blacks over their darker counterparts has led to theory of consistent patronage by white fathers. While light-skinned Blacks certainly enjoyed a level of privilege, there is little proof that most received educations and dowries directly from their white fathers. Most light-skinned blacks lived off of compensatory benefit received one to three generations early; and expanded on this usually in black and mixed-race enclaves where they could own businesses and earn a living as the educated/trained "blacks". These compensatory benefits occasionally came from white grand or great grandfathers. Other times, they came from former slave masters rewarding prized mixed-race slaves for years of service in "the house" or as close assistants to the Master (a position that darker black people were afforded less often). A small portion of white fathers would pay for the education of their mixed-race children, especially sons, who might be educated in France. Why Black females of African descent are consistently ascribed such different experiences from white, Asian, and indo-native females when discussing sexual slavery and abuse, has long been a topic of debate. From the 17th century,
Virginia and
other colonies passed laws determining the social status of children born in the colonies. Under the
common law system in the colonies, children took the status of the father when it came to legal matters. To settle the issue of the status of children born in the colony, the Virginian
House of Burgesses 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; a few wealthy planters sent their mixed-race children to the North for education and sometimes for freedom. Some men freed both their enslaved women 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 enslaved Black women 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.
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. McCollum had testified that Adams 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 $1455 in 2023 dollars) in Guangzhou and sold for $400 (about $14,550 in 2023 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 in
Nazi Germany. 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 ,
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. ; 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
Japanese army'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