Abduction Of Women Research Articles

Photo Essay: Abduction in Sudan

I May 2004 I traveled to the southern state of Bahr el-Ghazal in Sudan to interview women and children who had been abducted and now were being returned. Slave trading has a long-standing history in the states that developed in the Nile valley, and although the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium officially abolished slavery in 1924, the practice has continued among pastoral groups in northern and southern Sudan. The desertification of western Sudan has led some Baggara, the Arab cattle-keeping peoples of western Sudan, to move further south in their search for water and grazing lands. Broader disagreements over control of the state, which culminated in a series of civil wars in Sudan, have given the practice of enslavement an additional dimension, as a failed judiciary and successive governments’ support of the slave trade erased any semblance of accountability and exacerbated existing tensions between rival ethnic groups. The arming of the Baggara by the Government of Sudan has all but erased previously existing local dispute-resolution mechanisms by giving the Baggara license to loot and abduct their neighbors. The Baggara have a variety of relationships with their captives. These include forms of economic exploitation, such as debt bondage; sexual exploitation, where young girls are made to be “wives” or are otherwise sexually abused; and occasionally even adoption. Some abductees return voluntarily, after escaping or being released from their captor’s control, and make their way south on foot. Others are brought back by a joint committee established by the Government of Sudan in 1999 called CEAWC, the Committee for the Eradication of Abduction of Women and Children. This committee is comprised of both Dinka Chiefs and leaders of the Arab communities that historically conducted the slave raids in the South. It reports directly to the President of Sudan and receives funding from the Government of Sudan. Some time after the creation of CEAWC, this organization began bringing women and children to Save the Children Fund-UK centers in the North without any documentation. Now, a difficult problem has emerged

:Elizabethan Literature and the Law of Fraudulent Conveyance: Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare

This book investigates the origins, impact, and outcome of the Elizabethan obsession with fraudulent conveyancing, the part of debtor-creditor law that determines when a court can void a transfer of assets. Focusing on the years between the passage of a key statute in 1571 and the court case that clarified the statute in 1601, Charles Ross convincingly argues that what might seem a minor matter in the law was in fact part of a wide-spread cultural practice. The legal and literary responses to fraudulent conveyancing expose ethical, practical, and jurisprudential contradictions in sixteenth-century English, as well as modern, society. At least in English Common Law, debt was more pervasive than sex. Ross brings to this discussion a dazzling knowledge of early modern legal practice that takes the conversation out of the universities and Inns of Court and brings it into the early modern courtroom, the site where it had most relevance to Renaissance poets and playwrights. Ross here examines how during the thirty years in which the law developed, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare wrote works that reflect the moral ambiguity of fraudulent conveyancing, which was practiced by unscrupulous debtors but also by those unfairly oppressed by power. The book starts by showing that the language and plot of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor continually refers to this cultural practice that English society came to grips with during the period 1571-1601. The second chapter looks at the social, political, and economic climate in which Parliament in 1571 passed 13 Eliz. 5, and argues that the law, which may have been used to oppress Catholics, was probably passed to promote business. The Sidney chapter shows that Henry Sidney, as governor of Ireland (a site of religious oppression), and his son Philip were, surprisingly, on the side of the fraudulent conveyors, both in practice and imaginatively (Sidney's Arcadia is the first of several works to associate fraudulent conveyancing with the abduction of women). The fourth chapter shows that Edmund Spenser, who as an official in Ireland rails against fraudulent conveyors, nonetheless includes a balanced assessment of several forms of the practice in The Faerie Queene. Chapter five shows how Sir Edward Coke's use of narrative in Twyne's Case (1601) helped settle the issue of intentionality left open by the parliamentary statute. The final chapter reveals how the penalty clause of the Elizabethan law accounts for the punishment Portia imposes on Shylock at the end of The Merchant of Venice. The real strength of the book lies in Ross's provocative readings of individual cases, which will be of great use to literary critics wrestling with the applications of legal theory to the interpretation of individual texts. This study connects a major development in the law to the literature of the period, one that makes a contribution not only to the law but also to literary studies and political and social history.

‘The chief sufferers’: Abduction of women during the partition of the Punjab*

(1995). ‘The chief sufferers’: Abduction of women during the partition of the Punjab. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 18, North India: Partition and Independence, pp. 57-72.

The Abduction of Women in Barbaric Law

Among the most disturbing aspects of very early law are the glimpses we sometimes receive of a remote and, by civilised standards, savage time, the period that Georges Simenon once referred to as "bygone epochs of life in the forests." It is largely because of these spectres from the past that there is a reluctance to accept evidence of practices we understandably abhor. Rudolph Huebner, writing before much anthropology had softened our reactions, shuddered at the "cold-blooded and brutal character" of bride-purchase, which he thought appeared nowhere in "more repulsive form than in some of the Anglo-Saxon laws." Evidence of the abduction of women has inspired similar revulsion, although in this case, the Anglo-Saxon codes are not alone in their explicitness. As is the case with all points of primitive law, the challenge lies in understanding its context, and in matters of such rudimentary concern as mating, we have also to allow for socio-biological factors which in more sophisticated legal systems are less shockingly obtrusive.