New Publication in the JAH!

Hot off the presses! My new article “Street Hawking or Street Walking in Dahomey? Debates about Girls’ Sexual Assaults in Colonial Tribunals, 1924-41” is now out! You can find it in the November 2022 issue of the Journal of African History.

This was an incredibly challenging article to research and write, but I am proud to have seen it through to publication. When I first went to the archives in Benin in 2012 to research child labor in colonial Dahomey, I was not prepared for one of my richest sources on the quotidian lives of girls and their labor being cases of sexual assault. I remember one box of legal records being too much for me and having to leave the archives for the day. I have done my best to witness these girls bravery and suffering as well as that of their caregivers.

Here is the abstract:

Between the judicial reorganizations of 1924 and 1941, the colonial tribunals in Dahomey heard more than two hundred cases of rape. Teenage or younger girls engaged in street hawking were the most common victims of rape who reported their assaults to these tribunals. Many of the cases stand out because market women played the dominant role in transforming girl hawkers’ experiences of sexual assault into formal grievances. The history of sexual assault in colonial Africa has largely focused on how ‘customary’ and colonial courts have or have not punished the crime of rape. This approach privileges masculine authorities’ views of sex, consent, and gender violence. This article focuses on the investigative processes in cases of sexual assault. In doing so, two gendered histories emerge: firstly, a history of elder female caregiving to girls suffering the aftereffects of sexual assaults and, secondly, a history of the vulnerability of hawkers to quotidian sexual violence.