As it was elsewhere, sexual violence was a ubiquitous component of enslavement throughout the history of slavery in Virginia. Enslavers exercised almost complete control over the bodies of enslaved individuals and the conditions of their existence, providing themselves with numerous avenues for force and coercion in the intimate lives of the enslaved. The plantation culture itself, with its strict hierarchy of white male authority, emboldened enslavers to demean and dominate those over which they held power.
And the law provided enslaved people with no protection from sexual violence. The rape of an enslaved woman was not a crime under most state laws. In George v. Because of this absence of legal protection, historians lack an archive of legal cases to determine the extent of sexual violence against the enslaved and must rely on other evidence.
For enslaved women in particular, slave narratives speak to the ubiquity and constant threat of sexual violence at the hands of enslavers, their family members, overseers, and others. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of their children? Did the other slaves dare to allude to it, except in whispers among themselves? No, indeed! Den he gits in bed wid slave himself. Some women would fight and tussel. Elizabeth Keckly , who was born into slavery in the Piedmont region of Virginia and taken by her enslavers to North Carolina, told in her narrative Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House of being repeatedly raped by the son of a wealthy plantation owner who lived nearby; eventually she gave birth to son that he fathered.
Indeed, the sons of enslavers often repeated the patterns of sexual exploitation they learned on the plantation. Women were not the only ones who faced sexual assault. As with enslaved women, fighting back was usually futile, as those who resisted would be whipped or sold to a plantation in the Lower South, separated from their families and consigned to a life of even harder labor.
Nonetheless, some enslaved people did resist, self-emancipating, fighting back, or, in extreme cases, resorting to the murder of their abusers. Black women had long been depicted by early European travelers as especially fertile and hypersexual, a view that was carried over to enslaved women to justify sexual contact without consent. Both enslaved men and women endured violations of their bodies and a general lack of consideration for their privacy; they were scrutinized, groped, and objectified by enslavers.
