Aesthetics of Slavery & Slave Trade Crimes

In his insightful new book, Invisible Atrocities, Randle DeFalco examines the aesthetic biases of international criminal law (ICL). DeFalco astutely argues that ICL prioritizes punishing "horrific spectacles" of violence while ignoring less visible, attritive forms of violence that cause similar levels of harm and suffering, generally over longer periods of time. While ICL is selective in its preference for "horrific spectacles," even the spectacular violence has been rendered invisible in ICL when inconvenient factual evidence counters dominant narratives in international law.<br><br>One such dominant narrative is the successful abolition of slavery and the slave trade of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the United Kingdom did lead international efforts to abolish slavery and the slave trade, de facto slavery and the slave trade persist as such globally. As in some of the worst slave trades of the pastnamely, the Trans-Atlantic and East African Slave trades-contemporary conflicts and today's liberal global economies of empire remain dependent upon slave trade and slavery institutions, systems, and practices.<br><br>Why, then, does ICL unnecessarily narrow slavery crimes' definitional breadth while naming slavery criminal conduct only as other crimes, including conscription of children, sexual slavery, and forced marriage as an "other inhumane act," not to mention the transnational crime of human trafficking? And why has the slave trade been completely abandoned as a separately enumerated crime under the Rome Statute? This Article explores the ways in which slavery and the slave trade are rendered invisible in international law, escaping characterization as such or as international criminal conduct altogether. In particular, precursory conduct to slavery crimes tends to elude legal characterization. Consequently, the slave trade fails to be prosecuted and punished. This Article urges a commitment to understanding and rendering fully visible slavery and the slave trade as international crimes, to correcting aesthetic and other biases in ICL, and to providing redress for some of the most persistent crimes in international law.