Preliminary Programme

‘Forced marriage’ and sexual slavery in contemporary African conflict are female gender-specific crimes against humanity, unusual in that they are predominantly committed within armed groups. They highlights tensions between the militarization of girls and women in war, and the ‘civilianization’ of contemporary conflict, blurring the boundaries between modalities of life in peace and war, and between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’. The current literature is dominated by legal, gender studies and humanitarian readings, but this paper contends that a rigorous historical contextualization of the place of girls and young women in African conflicts, and a historicized reading of current evidence, are necessary to properly understand the phenomenon of ‘forced marriage’ among ‘girl soldiers’ in Africa. The paper’s evidential base includes the Sierra Leone TRC report, Machel report, UN Office for the High Commissioner on Human Rights, international humanitarian reports, and ‘girl soldier’ memoirs. The paper begins by investigating strategic reasons for the forcible marriage of girl soldiers, before moving on to analyse legal and humanitarian/human rights discourses surrounding ‘forced marriage’ as a crime against humanity, and its relationship to ‘sexual slavery’, ‘forced labour’ and ‘customary marriage’. It will historically contextualize these debates as a critical interface of shifting gender rights, child rights, cultural relativism, and the ‘child soldier’ crisis. Finally, the paper will problematize the evidence deployed in these debates, questioning how girls who have suffered forced marriage and sexual slavery understand and narrate the violence that is done to them, and how humanitarian discourses have constructed the categories of ‘bush wives’ and ‘girl soldiers’ from such narratives: how the silences and ‘outrages’ surrounding forced marriage have seen girls constructed as victims, perpetrators or individuals displaying tactical agency, from the local community to the international stage. (Show less)

This paper will build on my recent work on understanding representations of the child rapist in early modern England and their relationships to the later nineteenth-century construction of the paedophile. Such a man was one who was understood to have exercised little control over his behaviour and appetites, whether sexual or otherwise immoral. At the same time, contemporary understandings about the nature of children were also different, both because the legal age of consent to sexual intercourse was lower than it is today, and also because the idea of the innocence of childhood had not yet been fully developed. This paper will consider how, in these circumstances, the rape and sexual assault of (female) children by other (male) children were discussed, explained, excused or condemned.

A number of those who were prosecuted for sexual crimes against children were young boys, or adolescents, aged between 12 and 18. The age of consent for a boy to marriage and sexual intercourse was 14, although medical understandings about puberty and the age of sexual development held that boys might not be completely sexually or reproductively functional until their later teens. Testimony in such trials reveals how both medical men and the law negotiated ideas about physical sexual development and legal culpability to either excuse or condemn teen-aged boys for sexually transgressive behaviour committed with other children, as well as how early modern society more broadly regarded sexual activity between children and their capacity for understanding both sexual consent and the wider social and cultural significance of their actions. Sexual crime committed by children and adolescents against other children raised questions about the status of children in relation to contemporary ideas about childhood, sexuality, criminality and culpability.
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