Sierra Leone passed a Sexual Offences Act in 2012 which raised the age for sexual consent to 18 officially to prevent rape. While celebrated internationally as a mile-stone towards the prevention of sexual violence, this Act is ambiguous. Because the Act criminalises all sexual relationships with minors—to simultaneously decrease teenage pregnancy—the state entered households and bedrooms triggering complex debates around age, sexual consent and punishment rendering previously legal relationships unlawful. State courts now sentence boys to a maximum of 15 years in prison for sleeping with underage girlfriends, forcefully separating young couples.
Based on fieldwork in courts, prison and communities in Freetown, this paper analyses how this policing of relationships and the reactions of affected couples creates sexualized and confined citizenship.
It concentrates first on boys who have been incarcerated for sleeping with and impregnating underage girlfriends. While the focus of confinement scholarship has been on highlighting the dynamic relationship or ‘deadly symbiosis’ (Wacquant 2001) between confining institutions and marginalised urban spaces and on showing continuities pre-, during-, and post-imprisonment by demonstrating how prison walls bend (da Cunha 2008), the boys imprisoned under the SOA find themselves at the lowest end of prison hierarchies, entirely excluded from social networks of reciprocity after a social death (Guenther 1971). While wealthy youth and older men usually escape prison, these boys come from poor backgrounds, are unable to afford proper legal representation and cannot lean on a strong social network. After the arrest of the boyfriends, both partners experience necropolitics (Mbembe 2003), leading to the disassociation of punishment and wrongdoing and to the annihilation of self and agency at the hands of state power (Le Marcis 2017). The state performs these prisoners out of existence by changing their age: there is no record of minors in Pademba Road prison, officially they do not exist.
Secondly, the paper follows their girlfriends—the alleged rape victims—who after the state staged the drama of saving them from a threat that does not exist can, if at all, only rarely see their imprisoned partners. With the fathers of their unborn children imprisoned, these girls are forced into a precarious existence. They are left to fend for themselves and find ways to provide for and raise their children
Through analysing legal and substantive forms of state practices and showing how the state and citizens shape each other through effects on their bodies, practices and personhood, the paper argues for an understanding of confinement, not as a site, but an intersectional and imposed state of being; a result of sexualized citizenship and a discursive practice of conflicted state-citizen relations.