Sexual Slavery

The exercise of ownership-like control over a person combined with compelling that person to engage in one or more acts of a sexual nature, recognized as a distinct crime against humanity and war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, separate from the broader crime against humanity of enslavement, in recognition of its documented use as a specific tactic in armed conflict and by extremist organizations, including the systematic sexual enslavement of Yazidi women and girls by the Islamic State beginning in 2014 and the wartime sexual slavery imposed on so-called comfort women by the Imperial Japanese military during the Second World War. Sexual slavery is legally distinguished from human trafficking for sexual exploitation in that it does not require proof of a transnational trafficking process, focusing instead directly on the exercise of ownership powers and the compelled sexual acts themselves, though the two offenses frequently occur together in practice.