For years, the so-called Islamic State (IS) not only abducted and enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and children, it also bureaucratised the system.It produced ledgers, sales contracts and religious manuals governing the ownership, trade and abuse of captives.Yet despite the extensive documentation of the crimes, only a small number of people around the world have ever been prosecuted.Most of them have been women.Australia has become one of the latest countries to charge its own citizens over alleged slavery crimes committed during IS's brutal rule across parts of Syria and Iraq.Two Australian women who returned from Syria earlier this month were charged with crimes against humanity Another faces terror-related offences.Kawsar Abbas, 53, faces charges of enslavement, possessing a slave, using a slave and engaging in slave trading.Zeinab Ahmad, 31, is charged with enslavement and use of a slave.Australia's prosecutions reflect a growing international effort to confront the role some women allegedly played in facilitating and enforcing IS's system of enslavement; atrocities Australia recognised in 2018 as amounting to genocide.To date, most of the people charged overseas in relation to IS's system of enslavement have been women accused of helping facilitate, enforce or profit from it.Germany led the world's first prosecutions over IS crimes against Yazidis in 2021, using universal jurisdiction laws to prosecute international crimes committed abroad.Yazidis are a minority ethno-religious group primarily from northern Iraq that was systematically persecuted after IS's 2014 invasion