Child slavery

Child slavery is the slavery of children. The enslavement of children can be traced back through history. One of the biggest examples of child slavery is exemplified when examining chattel slavery in America. Even after the abolition of slavery, children continue to be enslaved and trafficked in modern times.

Child slavery refers to the slavery of children below the age of majority. In the past, many children have been sold into slavery in order for their family to repay debts or crimes or earn some money if the family were short of cash. A scholar retold a story about a mother where, “her predicament shattered the privilege of thinking of her children in purely personal and sentimental terms and caused her to consider whether outsiders might find value in them." Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about a woman who was bought by a slave owner to breed children for him to sell. The expectations of children who were either bought or born into slavery varied. Scholars noted, “age and physical capacity, as well as the degree of dependence, set the terms of children's integration into households." The duties that child slaves were responsible for performing are disputed amongst scholars. A few representations of the lives that slave children led portrayed them as, “virtually divorced from the plantation economy until they were old enough to be employed as field hands, thereby emphasizing the carefree nature of childhood for a part of the slave population that was temporarily spared forced labor.” This view also stated that if children were asked to perform any duties at all, it was to perform light household chores, such as being “organized into ‘trash gangs’ and made to collect refuse about the estate.” Opposing scholars argued that slave children had their youth stolen from them, and were forced to start performing adult duties at a very young age. Some say that children were forced to perform field labor duties as young as the age of six. It is argued that in some areas children were put to "regular work in the antebellum South" and it "was a time when slaves began to learn work routines, but also work discipline and related punishment." A degree of self-possession was present in some degree to adults, but “children retained the legal incapacities of dependence even after they had become productive members of households.” It was reported by scholars that, “this distinctive status shaped children's standing within familial households and left them subject to forced apprenticeship, even after emancipation.” There were slave owners who did not want child slaves or women who were pregnant for fear that the child would have "took up too much of her time." The conditions of slavery for pregnant women varied regionally. In most cases, women worked in the fields up until childbirth performing small tasks. “four weeks appears to have been the average confinement period, or ‘lying-in period’, for antebellum slave women following delivery in the South as a whole. Slaveholders in northern Virginia, however, usually only permitted an average lying-in period of about "two weeks before ordering new mothers back to work.” The responsibility of raising and tending to the children then became the task of other children and older elderly slaves. In most institutions of slavery throughout the world, the children of slaves became the property of the owner. This created a constant supply of people to perform labor. This was the case with, for example, thralls and American slaves. In other cases, children were enslaved as if they were adults. Usually the status of the mother is determined if the child was a slave, but some local laws varied the decision to the father. In many cultures, slaves could earn their freedom through hard work and buying their own freedom.

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