3 - Gendered Differences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Men, women, and children were all trafficked in Late Antiquity and throughout the early Middle Ages. Although the experiences of trafficking and enslavement were similar for all in that victims, regardless of their sex, met with violence, intimidation, coercion, and deception as a result of the dehumanization and commodification of abductees, the conditions of those experiences were nevertheless gendered. Sexualized violence against women and children remained a looming and perpetual threat in late antique and early medieval human trafficking activities that adult men generally did not face. While this fact should come as no surprise to anyone, the importance of this observation lies in continuity; the dangers of exploitation and violation for trafficked women and children remained a predictable constant that linked the slave trade of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages to the sex trafficking networks of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period.
As enslaved prepubescent children, both boys and girls commonly experienced sexual exploitation. In Antiquity, Jasper Griffin contends that relations with young boys, provided they were not freeborn, was quite common considering the Roman literary references, inscriptional evidence at Pompeii, and the regular accusations and scandals of the Late Republic. The Augustan state calendar recorded that boys employed in male prostitution (pueri lenoniorum) had their own official holiday on 25 April. In the Declamationes of the orator, Quintilian (c. 35–100), a foster father berates a man who abandoned his son, claiming that, ‘If it had been up to you […] beasts would have torn him [the abandoned son] apart, or birds would have carried him away, or, much worse, the pimp or the gladiator trainer would have gotten him.’ Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) urged Christian parents to never abandon their children, ‘because we have observed that nearly all such [abandoned] children, boys as well as girls, will be used as prostitutes.’ Lactantius (c. 250–325) decried the practice of child abandonment, claiming that exposed boys and girls ended up ‘either in slavery or the brothel.’ Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) observed that enslaved boys were ‘beautified’ prior to display in the markets in order to attract potential buyers, and pondered, ‘How many fathers, forgetting the children they have abandoned, unknowingly have relations with a son who is a prostitute or a daughter who has become a harlot?’
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- Information
- Human Trafficking in Medieval EuropeSlavery, Sexual Exploitation, and Prostitution, pp. 143 - 166Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020