Sierra Leone’s harsh new laws to protect women and girls are causing harm in the wrong places

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Luisa T. Schneider, Assistant Professor, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Independent Social Research Foundation

In the decades after Sierra Leone’s civil war (1991-2002), there was pressure on the west African country to demonstrate progress on gender equality. Laws were passed to fight domestic violence, rape and teen pregnancy. But drawing on colonial legal models, the reforms don’t always match social realities and in many cases are harming young people from poor communities. Punishment is being made more important than resolution or education.

Luisa T. Schneider is an anthropologist who has spent a decade researching the subject. We asked her about her open source book Love and Violence in Sierra Leone: Mediating Intimacy after Conflict.

What did your study involve?

My research began in Freetown in 2012, ten years after the civil war’s violence, especially against women and girls. In 2016 I began living in a hillside community in eastern Freetown and also with a group of young men downtown. For 13 months I studied intimate relationships and followed disputes from household quarrels to community mediations and court cases, tracing over 100 through the magistrate’s court. I also spent time in Central Prison, interviewing men and boys convicted in “women cases”.

I wanted to know how love and violence intersect in everyday life and how law reshapes both.

What did you find?

In Sierra Leone, gender and relationships lie at the heart of moral life. Care, warmth and resilience are virtues held in high regard, and they are cultivated and learnt from women. But this masks the widespread abuse of women and places the unpaid labour of holding families and communities together on them. When the state tries to regulate intimacy without considering these moral realities, it deepens the very violence it seeks to end.

Love and violence often live together, tangled in ways that make harm hard to end. People say that when harm occurs, judgment falls not only on the act but on the person’s character. Communities call for state involvement in cases of rape against minors or severe violence. But everyday conflicts in consensual relationships are generally understood as matters of character and relational repair rather than criminal intent. They are mediated internally, often by women who bear the burden to prioritise group stability over punishment.

Yet, the country’s legal system often tells a different story.

After the war, new laws were introduced to protect women and girls from rape, early pregnancy, and domestic violence. Key laws include:

Sexual Offences Act (2012; amended 2019): criminalises rape, sexual assault and sexual exploitation; raises age of consent to 18; mandatory sentences; zero-tolerance enforcement reshapes policing of adolescent sexuality and youth relationships.
Domestic Violence Act (2007): criminalises physical, sexual, emotional and economic abuse within intimate and family relationships; recognises private-sphere violence as a public concern.
Child Rights Act (2007; revised 2025): defines children as rights-bearing subjects entitled to care, protection and due process, aligned with international standards.
Prevention of Child Marriage Act (2024): prohibits marriage under 18 to end early marriage and related health and educational harms.
Diversion and Alternatives to Detention Framework (2025): redirects children in conflict with the law from imprisonment to rehabilitation, mediation and reintegration.

Together, these reforms are meant to protect. But I found they also collapse care, consent and harm into a single criminal framework that misfits the lived realities of the Sierra Leoneans I lived and worked with. Importantly, mine is not an argument against protecting children from sexual harm, but about how protection is defined and enforced.

Although recent reforms frame children as having rights and promote alternatives to detention, boys charged under sexual offences law are routinely denied bail and treated as adult perpetrators. This reveals a contradiction in the system. It conflates rape, harm and consensual adolescent intimacy into a single category of criminality.

By raising the age of consent to 18, many ordinary youth relationships became criminalised. A 19-year-old can now face years in prison because his girlfriend is 17, even though she has chosen to love him. In aiming for zero tolerance, the state has policed intimacy instead of teaching consent.

In a society battling poverty and corruption, the new laws often shield the wealthy and punish the powerless. Young couples, especially across class lines, can be convicted, while powerful older men who abuse children can walk free.

One High Court judge told me:

We have serious problems with rape in this country. But of 25 or maybe 30 cases … mostly there are boyfriends here, you know, lovers. Maybe almost 23 of them are lovers. But the law is so rigid that I have to convict no matter the circumstance.

The updated Sexual Offences Act has deepened fear. It lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 12; sexual cases are now sent directly to the High Court; and life sentences are allowed.

Convictions happen even when girls testify that they love the boy or man who stands accused and confirm consensual sex took place. Many of the cases I studied are initiated by parents, neighbours, or teachers. This was often after pregnancies, school conflicts, or community disputes made relationships visible. Often the relationship happened within unequal social conditions between the partners.

In my view, what communities seek to mend through care, the law isolates and punishes. Conversations about consent, safety and protection disappear when love itself risks imprisonment. Women in violent relationships, meanwhile, lose attention and resources as the system turns to criminalising consensual intimacy.

What does this say about gender and justice?

Sierra Leoneans believe a good man is made not by punishment but by being raised with respect, love and care for others. As a community elder put it:

A child taught to kill becomes cruel. A child taught to love protects everyone.

Yet laws carry war’s legacy in their effort to discipline masculinity instead of guiding it.

What do you hope readers take away from your book?

Sierra Leone’s moral vision, found in everyday speech, mediation practices and women’s community leadership, reminds us that femininity is not weakness but wisdom. And that any just system must build on that strength.

If women were actually treated as they are morally regarded in Freetown – as strong, capable and central to social wellbeing – then both patriarchy and violence would begin to lose their hold. Ending violence begins in the home, in everyday care, and in the way we raise our children.

This isn’t just about Sierra Leone. It matters the world over. Law alone cannot end violence. Laws can punish, but they cannot teach care, consent or empathy. Yet punishment increasingly replaces education.

The lesson is clear: without engaging local understandings of care, consent and responsibility, laws meant to protect risk reproducing harm rather than preventing it.

Luisa T. Schneider receives funding from the Dutch Network of Women Professors, Oxford University, the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and the Royal Anthropological Institute.

I am assistant professor in Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale)

– ref. Sierra Leone’s harsh new laws to protect women and girls are causing harm in the wrong places – https://theconversation.com/sierra-leones-harsh-new-laws-to-protect-women-and-girls-are-causing-harm-in-the-wrong-places-269662