About

My project will examine the myth of the virgin cure, a common western concept from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. The virgin cure, a belief that sex with a virgin can cure a man of venereal disease over time, became a racialised concept that informed colonial ideas of sexual harm inflicted on African children.

As an interdisciplinary and intersectional study, I examine how colonial ideas of sexual harm dovetailed with patriarchal African ideas regarding childhood sexuality, that legitimised sexually violent puberty rites such as a girl was ready for marriage upon her first period. These ideas informed colonial medical and legal concepts of ‘childhood tropical sexuality’ and informed international age of consent legislation and childhood sexual protection laws between 1850 and 1980 in the Gold Coast and Britain.

Despite its problematic colonial roots ‘tropical sexuality’, a form of racist and gendered colonial medical anthropology continued to influence child sexual protection policies of the United Nations and the World Health Organisation throughout the twentieth century and into the present. As recently as the 1990s, these organisations were still reproducing long-standing colonial traditions of situating non-white sexuality as ‘tropical’ and indigenous children as sexually ‘precocious’, reproducing colonial norms as modern policies.

I will examine colonial medico-legal categories of childhood, puberty and sexual consent through the lens of medical anthropology and consider how these intersected with social constructions of race, gender, sexual disease and masculinity within the colonial and post-colonial period. I suggest the colonial sexualisation of black children is central to our modern understanding of racialised childhood sexualities. My study unpacks the framing of the black female child as a sexualised legal and medical category and identifies and challenges these racist gendered power structures that endorse sexual violence against black children with the guise of ‘scientific’, ‘medical’ and legal respectability.