‘Such a Mass of Disgusting and Revolting Cases’: Moral Panic and the ‘Discovery’ of Sexual Deviance in Post-Emancipation Jamaica (1835–1855)

Abstract

Why were so many sex offences prosecuted in the Jamaican courts in the 1840s and early 1850s when so few had been heard before 1834? Local elites and colonial officials were almost unanimous in their belief that this episode represented an outbreak of sexual deviance and a disturbing manifestation of regression towards ‘African barbarism’. Using the concept of the moral panic as an explanatory tool, I argue here that this ‘epidemic’ was largely manufactured, the product of displaced elite anxieties about the dangers of freedom, and that it played a pivotal role in the abandonment of reform and the return to repression a decade after full emancipation.