An international conference on Children and Slavery will be held in Avignon from 20-22 May 2004. It will examine the role of children in slavery in different regions from Antiquity to the present day, including the systems involved (indigenous and ‘imported’), the means employed to enslave children, and the child slave’s tactics of survival and ‘resistance’.

The themes to be considered will include:

• The economic role of the child slave
• The child slave concubine/wife
• Eunuchs
• The child slave soldier
• Children in contemporary forms of slavery
• Inter-slave relations: child-woman, child-child, child-man
• The child in the slave ‘family’
• The child slave and culture, ideology and religion
• ‘Memory’ and the child slave
• The child slave in literature
• Survival tactics of the child slave
• ‘Resistance’ and the child slave
• The role of child slave ‘rebels’ (their status and function, and child-adult relations, during the revolt and in the rebel camp)
• Consequences of resistance for the child slave
• Man-child and woman-child relations in the slave owner–child slave context

Participants are equally invited to take into consideration recently published research on slavery and wherever valid to draw contrasts with slave systems outside their area of study. Of note here is research indicating that the role of children and women in slavery was much more important than has been assumed in the past.

Those interested are asked to send the organisers a title and one paragraph abstract of their proposed paper, in English or French before 30th September 2003. Those accepted must send their final by e-mail or on disk (IBM – Word 6 or more recent) before 1st March 2004.

For further details contact: