![]() ![]() ![]() Brought to France at the age of fifteen with a false promise of schooling and immigration assistance, Siliadin had been passed along to a couple who obliged her to labor as a housemaid and care for children for more than three years, without pay, ‘from 7.30 a.m. ![]() Indeed, although the French court of first instance did find her exploiters to be guilty of obtaining unremunerated labor from a ‘vulnerable and dependent person’, that conviction was overturned upon appeal. The case of Siwa Akofa Siliadin, a young Togolese woman held by a Parisian family as an involuntary domestic servant from 1995 to 1998, reflects this reluctance by courts to reach for the term ‘slavery’ in contemporary cases. And jurists have often been understandably reluctant to employ a word whose historical meaning was so closely tied to a specific property relationship that has long since been abolished in Europe and the Americas. When is it appropriate to apply the term ‘slavery’-a concept that appears to rest on a property right-to patterns of exploitation in contemporary society, when no state extends formal recognition to the possibility of the ownership of property in a human being? 1 Historians, who generally position themselves as enemies of anachronism, may be particularly resistant to the use of an ancient term to describe a twenty-first century reality. ![]() Siliadin v France and the Dynamics of Enslavement in Historical Perspective ![]()
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