Forced Marriage and the Special Court for Sierra Leone: Legal Advances and Conceptual Difficulties
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Forced marriage was endemic during the Sierra Leonean conflict. Girls and women forced to serve as 'wives' to rebel soldiers were usually expected to submit to ongoing rape and to provide domestic labour to their 'husbands'. Many of these 'wives' suffer from continuing stigmatization. The Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone brought forced marriage charges as a crime against humanity through the category of inhumane acts against Brima, Kamara and Kanu, affiliated with the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), and Sesay, Kallon and Gbao, affiliated with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). This article considers two benefits stemming from the resulting jurisprudence: the naming of forced marriage as an inhumane act and the acknowledgement of forced marriage as a violation not captured by other legal terms. However, conceptual difficulties remain: how should forced marriage be defined so as to fulfil the principle of nullum crimen sine lege? Is forced marriage more accurately labelled as enslavement? And, is conjugality accurately captured as a defining feature of forced marriage? If forced marriage is to be successfully prosecuted in other contexts - for example, in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia - then more attention must be paid to resolving these questions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".