ISIS reaches new low in treatment of sex slaves.

Trigger warning: This post deals with sexual abuse.

WHEN women are raped by fighters during a war, the babies that follow are living, breathing proof of that abuse. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has been plagued by conflict and sexual violence for years, some school-age girls have several children by different militia rapists.

In the 1990s conflict in former Yugoslavia, women were even imprisoned in “rape camps” with the explicit purpose of forcing them to give birth to their captors’ offspring.

But ISIS takes a different tack in its horrendous abuse of sex slaves. According to a new report by the New York Times, fighters from the terrorist group force women to take oral and injectable forms of contraception to prevent pregnancy. To ensure their sex slaves don’t give birth, ISIS fighters have also been known to force enslaved women to abort their pregnancies.

The decision to ensure that women remain child-free is an interpretation of “an obscure ruling in Islamic law cited by the Islamic State” under which a captor must ensure that his female slave is free of child before having intercourse with her, the New York Times reports.

This prohibition stems from an old ruling that a captor can have sex with a female slave only after “ensuring that the womb is empty,” for example by waiting for her to have her period, to guarantee there is no confusion over a child’s paternity.

The practice also keeps the sex trade running — meaning sexual abuse can continue unabated.

One 16-year-old woman kept captive by ISIS told the New York Times how her captor gave her a box of pills soon after buying her.

“Every day, I had to swallow one in front of him. He gave me one box per month. When I ran out, he replaced it,”  the girl, from the Yazidi ethnic group, explained.

“When I was sold from one man to another, the box of pills came with me.”

Another woman, 20, was pregnant at the time of her capture. An ISIS fighter “so urgently wanted her as his slave that he tried to end the pregnancy by giving her pills that would cause her to miscarry,” the New York Times reports.

The woman’s brother told the newspaper: “They wanted to get rid of the child so that they could use the woman.”

The practice of forcing contraception on sex slaves has resulted in a far lower pregnancy rate than would otherwise be expected, according to doctors caring for survivors. For example, of the more than 700 victims from the Yazidi ethnic group who have sought treatment at a clinic in northern Iraq, just five per cent fell pregnant during their enslavement.

Considering that the normal fertility rate for a young woman is between 20 percent and 25 percent in any given month, that figure is strikingly low. It’s even more striking when compared to the results of one medical study of 68 rape victims from the former Yugoslavian conflict, of which 29 had become pregnant.

ISIS fighters’ insistence on birth control brings relief to some of the sex slaves, since “[n]o one wants to carry the child of their enemy,” one woman told the New York Times. But it’s a double-edged sword: remaining pregnancy-free allows the rapes to continue, and represents yet another form of ISIS’ control over the women’s bodies.

As Mamamia previously reported, women are captured and offered to ISIS leaders as sex slaves before being put up for sale to foreign buyers for thousands of dollars. After that, they are offered to fighters for a lower price.

There’s even an official “price list” distributed by ISIS — and the younger the child, the higher the price they fetch, it seems.

Children aged under 10 currently sell for 165 USD (224 AUD), while adolescent girls are valued at 124 USD (168 AUD). According to RT News, women over the age of 40 are being sold for around 40 USD (54 AUD).

You can read more about ISIS’ price list for sex slaves here, and its “guidelines to rape” here.