Page 19 - Demo

Moral panic and the ‘discovery’ of sexual deviance in Post-Emancipation Jamaica (1835-55)
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elite, who both owned slaves and acted as magistrates in the slave courts. Those offences most commonly tried in these courts were running away, rebellion, and larceny, all of which threatened the planters’ authority. Sex offences, however, and other offences committed within the slave community, appear to have been of little concern to planters precisely because they did not challenge the established hierarchy. However, following the abolition of the slave courts in 1834, the vast majority of the island’s population became subject to the jurisdiction of the common-law courts, and the prosecutory landscape was radically reconfigured.
Among other things, what the above remarks suggest, of course, is that the relationship between the real incidence of an offence and its prosecution is very variable. This was certainly the case, and remains so today. However, the elites in mid-nineteenth century Jamaica clearly believed that the sudden increase in prosecutions broadly reflected a rise in the actual incidence of these offences, and they interpreted it as evidence that freedom was not working; that this apparent outbreak of sexual deviance constituted proof of a general regression towards ‘African barbarism’ and the failure of emancipation.
Using the sociological concept of the moral panic (a scare about a threat or supposed threat from a deviant minority) as an explanatory tool, the researcher argues that this ‘epidemic’ was largely manufactured; that it was less about sex, or crime, or law-breaking, and much more about elite anxieties over where emancipation was leading; and that it marked a decisive turning point in elite perceptions of the Afro-Jamaican majority. Henceforth, for the elite, the optimism of the immediate post- emancipation years evaporated and gave way to a growing pessimism about the capacity of the former slaves to take the path mapped out for them by their former masters. The scare over sexual deviance also played a pivotal role in the return to a general policy of repression. In 1850, the first in a series of measures heralding the definitive abandonment of the post- apprenticeship commitment to reform and rehabilitation, was passed in the House of Assembly. The ‘Whipping Act’, voted almost unanimously in January 1850, announced the return of
corporal punishment, which had been abolished in the heady days of 1840. If the renewed resort to flogging represented one component of the return to repression, the abandonment of the penal reform programme constituted another. Punishment and deterrence were henceforth to take precedence over tolerance and rehabilitation. The road to Morant Bay was being paved.
In the wider context, the Jamaican panic over sexual deviance can be situated at that mid-nineteenth-century crossroads in imperial policy, when London began to abandon its commitment to ‘improving’ subject peoples, and turned progressively to more paternalistic and authoritarian strategies founded increasingly on notions of racial superiority; when, in the words of one historian, “belief in the potential equality of all mankind...was shattered in the concatenation of wars, revolts and upheavals that marked the decade of imperial crisis between 1857 and 1867”.
In the context of today’s Jamaica, the scare of the mid-nineteenth century has an obvious relevance and resonance. Recent media and public obsession with the ‘buggery law’ and gay marriage demonstrates the continuing capacity of sexual matters to mobilise popular outrage, and to relegate fundamentally more important questions, like high unemployment and growing poverty, to the back burner. Moreover, we would do well to recognise that the ‘buggery law’, far from reflecting ‘our’ Jamaican culture, is no more than an archaic relic of British imperial rule, to wit articles 76 and 77 of the Offences against the Person Act of 1864 voted a few years after the panic over sexual deviance, and one year before the outbreak of the Morant Bay Rebellion.
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