Women were subject to widespread rape and sexual coercion. Perhaps the most notorious sexual predator was Thomas Thistlewood, a British plantation owner in Jamaica whose diary describes 3,852 acts of sexual intercourse with 138 enslaved women over thirty-seven years in the mid-1700s.[43] A recent study based on the DNA provided to the biotech company 23andme by 50,000 people demonstrates that he was far from the exception.[44] Almost twice as many males were transported across the Atlantic as females, and yet African women provided twice as much DNA to the modern-day population of former
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