In Sierra Leone, post-conflict legal reforms aimed at protecting women and children from sexual violence have extended the reach of the carceral state into the most intimate dimensions of life. Framed through security and protection, these regimes often replicate colonial logics—transforming love into liability and desire into evidence. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, I examine how children and young people are detained not for acts of violence, but for engaging in relationships that fall outside legally sanctioned norms of kinship and care. When young people lack “visible” or institutionally legible kin, they become targets of confinement; their social unmooring is read as risk.

Legal actors themselves operate within shifting terrains—caught between international agendas, national political aspirations, and the pressure to perform alignment with power. In this context, legality is not applied neutrally but enacted through affective readings, relational cues, and moral assessments.

I introduce the concept of carceral kinship to describe how individuals are judged not only by what they do, but by whether they are seen as “claimed” within normative family structures. When such ties are absent—or misrecognized—punishment intensifies. In tandem, carceral intimacy captures how youthful relationships, especially across gender lines, are criminalized under Euro-Christian, heteronormative ideals. Boys are imprisoned; girls are excluded, stigmatized, or forcibly removed. Intimacy becomes a liability, and the boundary between care and control collapses.

These dynamics are shaped by enduring colonial frameworks—embedded in international law, human rights discourse, and development agendas. Normative visions of protection and personhood, coded as universal, are exported globally as templates for reform. This lecture explores how legality is co-produced through these transnational infrastructures, and asks what becomes possible when we center relational life as a site of both harm and potential repair.

Short Bio

Luisa T. Schneider is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at VU Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of intimacy, violence, and legality, with a regional focus on West Africa and Western Europe. She is the author of Love and Violence in Sierra Leone: Mediating Intimacy after Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and has published widely on carceral practices, care, and the ethics of research. Luisa combines long-term ethnographic engagement with a critical feminist and decolonial approach, foregrounding the lived experiences and moral economies that shape both harm and healing.