This urban ethnography of violence in intimate relationships in Sierra Leone reveals its multifaceted nature, gender dynamics, and the complex interplay of domestic, community, and state interventions. It challenges victim–perpetrator narratives by highlighting relationship violence’s complexities, such as its use for expressing love or punishment. The study contextualises violence within Sierra Leone’s historical and geopolitical framework, emphasising the interaction of structural violence with local contexts. It examines women’s agency in relation to violence and the co-existence of love and violence in the society’s moral economy. Gendered aspects of violence show differences in how men and women perceive and enact violence. The study analyses community and family mediations of violence and discusses how especially men face barriers towards state reporting. State laws greatly impact sexual relationships involving minors, shaping young people’s lives, household formation, education, and social relations. In challenging conventional perspectives, the book provides valuable insights for policy-makers and scholars.

How do adults decide whether to report relationship violence to the police in Sierra Leone? This chapter analyses the intricacies, risks, and societal consequences, highlighting the role of gender, social status, and influence. Drawing from ethnographic accounts and first-hand experiences, it examines how, after the civil war, relationship violence, previously a private matter, became a public and political concern. Legal reforms impact addressing domestic violence, and both men and women face challenges reporting violence, such as social status loss, family/community fines, and social exclusion. In contemporary Sierra Leone, gender parallelism is not a fact but a strategic construct subject to negotiation and transformation. Individuals navigate conflicting gender norms, expectations, and responsibilities, highlighting the complexities of masculinity and femininity within a changing social and legal landscape. Effective policies should align with local contexts and promote dialogue to render reporting violence possible and promote gender justice.

This chapter traces black womanhood in Ellison’s writing to posit that he deploys a distinctly sonic figural aesthetic in his depictions black women that resounds with yet understudied meaning. Given Ellison’s stylistic attention to sound and music, interrogating the roles of black women as producers, performers, interpreters and instructors of sound and music reveals novel insights about the complex gendered dynamics of Ellison’s oeuvre. Oscillating between Invisible Man, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” and “As the Spirit Moves Mahalia,” this chapter charts the soundings of black women to theorize about their pivotal role in structuring Ellison’s most well-known works

Given that the French authorities usually did not tell their families the real reason for their conviction, prisoners could claim after the war that they went to military prison for an act of resistance, which was technically not incorrect but either covered up an amorous relationship or gave it a functionality (such as facilitating an escape or undermining enemy morale) that it almost never had. Former inmates of the military prison of Graudenz formed an association in France and tried to get recognition as war victims. Women sentenced for a forbidden relation usually had to live with the stigma of the (often adulterous) relationship. While their sentences for the relationship were voided after the war, they never received any compensation for the injustice they suffered.