What sexual slavery is in law

Sexual slavery is named in the Rome Statute in three separate places and defined in none of them. The definition sits somewhere most people never look: the Elements of Crimes, adopted by the states parties in 2002.

The test has exactly two parts. First, the perpetrator exercised any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership over a person: buying, selling, lending, bartering, or imposing a similar deprivation of liberty. Second, the perpetrator caused that person to engage in acts of a sexual nature. That is the whole definition.

What the ownership test means in practice comes from the Yugoslavia tribunal, in the Kunarac judgment. The appeals chamber listed the factors that matter: control of movement, control of the physical environment, psychological control, measures taken to prevent escape, force or the threat of it, duration, assertion of exclusivity, cruel treatment, control of sexuality, and forced labour.

Three of that court's findings do more work than the rest, because each of them kills a defence that gets raised every time.

• Consent is not an element. The prosecutor does not have to prove its absence, because enslavement flows from claimed rights of ownership. Nor can a lack of resistance be read as consent. That answers "she never tried to leave".
• Duration is not an element. What matters is the quality of the relationship, and length is only one factor among ten. That answers "it was only a few days".
• Nobody has a right of ownership over a person. The court said the law knows of no such right. Write that someone was treated as property. Never write that someone was owned.

Trafficking is a different thing, and the difference matters when you are writing about a case. Trafficking is a process: an act, a means and a purpose of exploitation, complete the moment those three exist and before any exploitation happens at all. Sexual slavery is a condition, and requires that ownership was actually exercised and that sexual acts actually followed.