Centre for the Study of International Slavery. 'A Southern "Culture of Abuse": Sex Trafficking and Sexual Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century US South'
5:00pm - 6:00pm /
Thursday 26th November 2015
Type: Seminar /
Category: Research
- Dr Alex Balch
- Suitable for: Anyone who is interested in this topic, including members of the general public.
- Admission: Free of charge
- Book now
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The extent to which sexual abuse was embedded in the culture of the South means that it is not always apparent to modern historians. This paper focuses primarily on language used in the 19th-century South that has helped to obscure the nature and scale of the sexual abuse of enslaved women by white men within the traditional historiography of slavery.
Opportunities to recognise and engage more meaningfully with certain historic processes are often afforded by similar patterns in the present. The argument that I put forward in this paper comes out of a cultural climate in which recent cases of institutionalised abuse are at the forefront of discussions around modern slavery, sex trafficking and child sex abuse. The current climate has enabled this project to recognise certain mechanisms and infrastructures that facilitate and allow for abusive behaviour, but has also provided useful the linguistic tools to name and discuss these institutions and processes.
Research on sexual slavery has been hampered by the sensitive nature of the topic and the language employed by the abusive culture whereby sex slaves were sometimes known by alternative job roles that unconsciously masked their primarily sexual labour. This paper will go some way in identifying various ways in which sexual slavery can be unearthed in the testimony of those formerly enslaved in the Civil War Era.
Opportunities to recognise and engage more meaningfully with certain historic processes are often afforded by similar patterns in the present. The argument that I put forward in this paper comes out of a cultural climate in which recent cases of institutionalised abuse are at the forefront of discussions around modern slavery, sex trafficking and child sex abuse. The current climate has enabled this project to recognise certain mechanisms and infrastructures that facilitate and allow for abusive behaviour, but has also provided useful the linguistic tools to name and discuss these institutions and processes.
Research on sexual slavery has been hampered by the sensitive nature of the topic and the language employed by the abusive culture whereby sex slaves were sometimes known by alternative job roles that unconsciously masked their primarily sexual labour. This paper will go some way in identifying various ways in which sexual slavery can be unearthed in the testimony of those formerly enslaved in the Civil War Era.