Beyond the Metropole
Racial politics were also central to understanding attitudes towards sexual violence in the colonies. Western debates over the age of consent of girls rippled outwards to the Empire, taking on specific forms in regions where child marriages were relatively common.
Debates over the age of consent were particularly marked in colonial India, and showed - on the surface at least - a divide between British and local ideas on the control of female sexuality.[253] In India in 1891, a bill was introduced to the Legislative Council to raise the age of consent for girls from 10 to 12 years (there was no serious discussion of raising the age of consent to 16, as it was in England). The Bill was designed to protect unmarried girls forced into prostitution and girls married at a young age, but it was the latter that was controversial. Though the Bill was not especially far reaching, and attempted not to ban child marriage but rather to prevent consummation, it generated extraordinary controversy. Despite the fact that in most regions a girl was not sent to the home of her husband before puberty (at around the age of 12),[254] the Bill sparked outrage. Opposition to the Bill focused on its removal of the authority of Indian men. Though the legislation was probably inspired by the death of a 10-year-old bride after forced sex, and there were some media discussions on the sexual assault of the child and the physical damage caused by intercourse and childbirth, in the main the debates focused on male rights.[255] Opposition was most fierce in Bengal, where it was argued that the Bill would interfere with a husband's fundamental patriarchal rights of access to his wife.[256] The Age of Consent Bill is often seen as a defining moment of Indian and especially Hindu nationalism, where the colonised opposed imperial rule. The Bill, then, was not only about the age of consent.[257] Though the outcome was ostensibly a victory for the imperialists, and in March 1891 the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure were amended to raise the age of consent to 12, historians have suggested the law was of limited practical use.[258]
More on the topic Beyond the Metropole:
- What turned precariously poised relationships into unsustainable ones were crises impacting several empires at the same time, crises whose course and outcome no one metropole could control.
- RETAINING METROPOLITAN CONTROL
- CONTRADICTIONS OF COLONIALISM
- The end of empire came swiftly.
- CROSS-SECTORAL LINKS
- SPECIFIC METROPOLES
- Identifying the legacies of European rule is fraught with conceptual and methodological perils.
- The empire as ‘outlet' for single women
- CONSOLIDATING CONTROL OVER SETTLERS: POLICY DILEMMAS
- DECOLONIZATION AND VIOLENCE
- Conceptual Origins
- For three and a half centuries Europeans extended the bounds of their overseas possessions. In the half century that commenced in the 1770s the scope of imperial holdings shrank dramatically.
- An overseas empire gained is not necessarily an empire retained.
- EFFECTS OF WESTERN EDUCATION
- VERTICAL VIOLENCE: DIFFERENCES IN METROPOLES’ POLICIES
- Introduction
- Repopulating France through colonisation
- SECTORAL AUTONOMY
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