Love and Violence in Sierra Leone

Dr Luisa T. Schneider is a sociocultural anthropologist, specializing in intimacy, violence, and law. Schneider is Assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam and Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, a published academic and public author, and advisor to policymakers and practitioners. She has conducted ethnographic research which emphasizes the importance of local knowledge for over ten years.

• Introduction; 1. Access, Methodology and Ethics; 2. The impact of violence on relationships; 3. Loving and living relationships in Freetown today; 4. The Spectrum of violence in relationships; 5. The language of violence; 6. Household and community mediations of violence; 7. Invoking the State-when Adults report violence in their relationships to the Police; 8. Minors before the Law-building futures, policing sex; 9. Perpetrators? The consequence of the sexual offences Act for Young Men; Conclusion; References; Index.

'In Luisa Schneider's ground-breaking study of the dialectics and dilemmas of intimacy in postwar Sierra Leone, 'love' and 'violence' are shown to be semantically and socially ambiguous. Even when an ideal complementarity is posited between men and women, the interplay between subtle persuasion and brute force (in local parlance, 'tongue' versus 'teeth') is not only volatile and vexed but further exacerbated by the incommensurability of state laws, local customs, notions of human rights, and the diversity of individual experience.' Michael Jackson, author of Life Within Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want