Childhood and children are new areas of research in Ottoman social history. Despite increasing interest in the history of children, we have still not established how Ottoman subjects of the 1600s conceived and perceived childhood. As far as the Crimean Khanate is concerned, there are no studies on childhood of any kind whatsoever. To fill this gap, at least partly, I will address the children forced to live as slaves. As the child slaves that were born in Crimea or had arrived at an early age, grew up within local society, they lived like Muslims, and were unaware of their Christian pasts. The focus of this study are the seventeenth-century Crimean Sharia court records, which survive in St. Petersburg, Russia. In these documents, child slaves are easy to identify, as the scribes registered them as dogma (born into slavery), çora (male child slave) and devke (female child slave). Given the information provided by the court registers, in this presentation I will argue that slaves born into Crimean society felt less like strangers than those brought in from the outside. In many ways, they lived and sometimes even thought, like other inhabitants of Crimea. One of the goals of my work is to examine how slavery affected children born into this condition that is boys and girls, who were slaves by being the offspring of both a slave mother and father. These children experienced their parents as human beings forced to live by the commands of a master or mistress, and they grew up with the knowledge that the same fate awaited them. As a comparison, I also trace the social status and emotions of slaves captured during raids at a young age. It is fortunate that there are accounts that reveal the longing of these slaves for the lives, from which slave raiders and traders had abducted them. Therefore, I shall be able to compare the cultural identity, cultural awareness and social reality of slave-born children with the understandings of those who became slaves after abduction at a young age.