Captivity (other)

Captivity, or being held captive, is a state wherein humans or other animals are confined to a particular space and prevented from leaving or moving freely. An example in humans is imprisonment. Prisoners of war are usually held in captivity by a government hostile to their own. Animals are held in captivity in zoos, and often as pets and as livestock.

Definition and scope

Captivity is the state of being captive, of being imprisoned or confined. The word derives from the late Middle English ''captivitas'', and the Latin ''captivus'' and ''capere'', meaning to seize or take, which is also the root of the English word, "capture".

In humans, captivity may include arrest and detention as a function of law enforcement and a civilian correctional system, detention of combatants in a time of war, as well as human trafficking, slave taking, and other forms of involuntary confinement, forced relocation, and servitude. In non-human animals, captivity may include confinement for the purpose of food production or labor, such as that done on a farm, confinement for the purpose of human recreation or education, such as that done at a zoo or aquarium, or confinement for the purpose of keeping domesticated pets, such as that commonly done with animals such as the house cat or the dog. In relation to non-living objects, captivity may describe the state of having control, whether that be control of one person over an object, such as " capturing a piece" in the game of chess, the control of a group over an area, such as the "capture" of a fort or city during a time of war, or control exercised by one object over another, such as one celestial body being "captured" by the gravitational pull of another, or a " captive balloon" which is tethered to the ground by a rope or string.

In a philosophical sense, captivity may refer not simply to confinement or lack of individual freedom, but also to the nature of a relationship between the captive and the captor, characterized by a lack of self-direction and autonomy. "Although the paradigm case of captivity is a free person who is held against her will by another, the existence of captive children and animals makes it clear that the denial of autonomy as it is usually understood is not a condition for captivity". In some instances, the captivity of the subject is clear, as with an animal kept in a cage at a zoo. However, circumstances exist under which captivity is more amorphous. For example, it has been noted that it is hard to say whether members of a rhinoceros family kept in a thousand-acre enclosure within their normal area of habitation, for purposes of insuring their preservation, are really in captivity.

Captivity may also be employed in more abstract or figurative senses, such as ''to captivate'', meaning to subdue through charm, or ''to capture'' such as an artist attempting to "capture a mood", or "capture a scene".

In humans

Arrest and incarceration

Humans are held captive under the authority of their own government for a number of different reasons. Under certain circumstances, a person suspected of committing a crime is subject to detention for a period of time while awaiting trial for that crime. In some cases, a person may be detained and then released without being charged with criminal wrongdoing. Persons convicted of a crime may sent to a prison.

According to the Institute for Criminal Policy Research at the University of London, as of 2016 an estimated 10.35 million people were imprisoned worldwide.

In warfare

Throughout human history, the practice of "captive taking" during war was commonly practiced. Those taken from the defeated group, most often women and children, would typically be enslaved, sold into slavery to others, forced to marry members of the victorious group, or held in permanent sexual captivity. The first Roman gladiators, for example, were prisoners of war. The taking of captives may have been a byproduct, but was also often a primary goal of conducting raids and warfare in small scale societies. According to some estimates of ancient societies, war captives and slaves may have at various points comprised as much as 20% of Roman Italy, 33% of Greece, 70% of Korea, 20% of some Islamic states, 40% of tropical American societies, and as much as half of some African societies. The practice of conducting raids for captive taking extended in some forms until modern times, for example, piracy in the Mediterranean Sea and the taking of captives to be sold as slaves continued until the 19th century, when it eventually culminated in the Barbary Wars.

Over time, nations found it to be in their interests to agree to international standards regarding the treatment of captured soldiers. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War, established that prisoners of war should be released without ransom at the end of hostilities and that they should be allowed to return to their homelands. Chapter II of the Annex to the 1907 Hague Convention ''IV – The Laws and Customs of War on Land'' covered the treatment of prisoners of war in detail. These provisions were further expanded in the 1929 Geneva Convention on the Prisoners of War and were largely revised in the Third Geneva Convention in 1949. Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention protects captured military personnel, some guerrilla fighters, and certain civilians. It applies from the moment a prisoner is captured until he or she is released or repatriated. One of the main provisions of the convention makes it illegal to torture prisoners and states that a prisoner can only be required to give their name, date of birth, rank and service number (if applicable).

In some wars, such as the First World War, the conditions of captivity were separated between camps for prisoners of war, and those for civilian internment. Some wars have seen mass wartime imprisonment. In addition to enemy military personnel, the Nazi regime imprisoned large numbers of private citizens based on their ethnicity, culture, or political views, as part of the regime's efforts to impose a vision of ethnic purity. Many millions were killed, or died of starvation or disease. In the United States, citizens of Japanese descent were imprisoned out of fear that their loyalty would be to the Japanese enemy."The War Relocation Authority and The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II: 1948 Chronology,
Web page
at www.trumanlibrary.org. Retrieved September 11, 2006.

Economic captivity

Humans have historically been subjected to a range of economic based captivity. In the extreme are various forms of slavery, such as the chattel slavery of the Americas, which utilized a monopoly of violence along with the power of the government to commandeer the labor of African Americans, Native Americans, and the indigenous people of Latin America and the Caribbean. Beyond but in many ways similar to slavery, many in colonial times regardless of ethnicity found captivity in the form of indentured servitude, impressed into forced labor until their debts could be paid. Alternatively, although the practice of slavery had since been abolished, many natives found themselves otherwise held captive, such as the internment of the Navajo in the American southwest in the 1860s, in part to force a transition to the life of sedentary Christian farmers.

In modern times, in what has been termed the prison–industrial complex, inmates, otherwise already subjected to captivity in terms of restriction of movement, may also be subjected to economic exploitation, through forced labor at little or no compensation. Alternatively, as Karen M. Morin examines, undocumented immigrants, neither prisoners nor slaves, have in instances been historically subjected to similar conditions, both in terms of freedom of movement as well as freedom of labor.

Others have examined economic captivity as it related to varying levels of inequality in developed societies. For example, George P. Smith II and Matthew Saunig examined the concept of economic captivity as it related to housing discrimination.

Human trafficking

Globally, it has been estimated that between 21 and 35.8 million people are victims of trafficking for sexual or labor exploitation, around two thirds of them women and girls. The issue has been addressed variously at the national level, and internationally with the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children

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