Pernicious Philanthropy: the legal and medical fetishization of black female childhood

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'Venereally acquired infections are occasionally encountered in precocious young girls...In certain (tropical) areas, misguided individuals may consider that an adult is cured of his gonorrhoea if intercourse is obtained with a virgin'.In 1958 Dr Robert Willcox, the Senior Consultant Venereologist to The World Health Organisation, wrote the quote above in his monograph in the medical textbook Diseases of Children in The Subtropics and Tropics, where he discussed the prevalence of venereal diseases in children and the in the 'tropics'. During World War Two, Willcox was one of the British Army venereologists in colonial West African. He attended to those 'misguided individuals' from the allied and African Military and Navy who engaged in legal sexual activity with children under sixteen. "When a girl reaches puberty, the whole tribe-both sexes-assembles. The operator, an elderly man, enlarges the vaginal orifice by tearing it downward with three fingers bound with opossum string... the perineum is split with a stone knife. This is usually followed by compulsory sexual intercourse with a number of young men."[1] This is Dr Roth's account of introcision, a 'perceived' puberty rite included in, Fact Sheet No. 23, Harmful Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children, 1995, from The United Nations. Roth's claimed to have 'discovered' it amongst a remote black Australian 'tribe' in the 1890s.Willcox's monograph was reproduced until 1991 and Roth's until 1995 within officially endorsed literature of the World Health organisation and the United Nations. This is an interdisciplinary project about the creation, trajectory and legacy of the intersection between colonialism, medical science, race and gender and how it shaped international age of consent legislation and childhood sexual harm between 1859 and 1960.