Jaycee Woods

My Boudica and The Butcher draft anti-war novel includes a taboo element: slavery.

In this fictional Second American Civil War, after the rebels refuse an amnesty offer, a law is passed making the criminal punishment for rebellion either death or slavery; under the 13th Amendment, involuntary servitude is permissible as punishment for a crime. Pragmatically given limited resources and a declining population, the government’s policy becomes to execute male rebel prisoners while offering female rebel prisoners a choice between death & slavery. [Note: I use “pragmatic” as a pejorative.]

This element isn’t advocacy, but a dramatization in an American setting of the 2014 Boko Haram attack in Chibok, Nigeria, which the Obamas drew attention to with #BringBackOurGirls. Boko Haram killed the male students while enslaving the female students. The world did not care when Boko Haram killed schoolboys, but the world was engaged when those teenage girls were “kidnapped.”

Why include such an offensive element in my story? To add horror to the depiction of the civil war. Having a no quarter policy for male prisoners doesn’t inspire the same outrage as stripping a woman of all her rights while turning her into literal property. Instead of military historian John Keegan’s ritualized warfare to reduce lethality, I focus on war’s brutality in the mode of 14th century Tamerlane.

Yet through euphemisms, in current year, we tend to ignore contemporary slavery in China, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, et al (see State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report on topic). Meanwhile, whistleblowers report that the Biden Admin actively facilitates Mexican cartels trafficking women & kids as slaves within the US.