Amina: Shaking Boundaries of a Woman Inhabited by the Spirits (Senegal).

In this article, I present the individual ethnography of Amina, a Senegalese woman possessed by the spirits of her lineage. Amina's story shows the lacerations of a person who simultaneously inhabits two worlds: the traditional Lebou culture and the Western one. When her spirits manifest themselves, she is forced to choose between two different interpretations of her suffering: the traditional persecutory and the Western psychopathological. She chooses the former but refuses the healers imposed by the tradition and turns to a priest of her choice, who proves to be sensitive to her need to personally own the healing journey. Amina strategically manipulates the plasticity of the traditional belief system without abandoning it; she bends it to shake the boundaries of herself, and her group and lineage. She uses the disruptive potential of possession and the irruption of the invisible world in the visible to renegotiate her role and acquire a new status in her group. She uses the performative dispositive of possession to renegotiate and expand her spaces of agency and affirm her tenacious subjectivity of a permanently liminal person, one who inhabits, shakes and redraws the boundaries between different worlds of meaning.

Assessing gender differences in emotional, physical, and sexual violence against adolescents living in the districts of Pikine and Kolda, Senegal.

BACKGROUND: Locally representative research and data on violence against children are important to understand the nature and scale of the issue and to inform effective prevention and response programs and policies. In Senegal, few population-level data estimating the prevalence of physical, emotional, or sexual violence against adolescents exist. OBJECTIVE: This study assesses whether the gender of adolescents in two Senegalese districts is associated with having experienced emotional, physical, or sexual violence and whether such associations vary depending on district of residence and poverty status. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: The sample comprised of 833 adolescents aged 13-18 residing in the peri-urban district of Pikine and rural district of Kolda. METHODS: Cross-sectional population-based household survey data were analyzed using logistic regression models. RESULTS: Adolescent boys had 1.6 times greater odds than adolescent girls of having experienced emotional abuse in the past month (adjusted OR = 1.6, 95 % CI 1.1, 2.5) in Pikine. Adolescents living in Pikine and in households with low poverty scores were more likely to have experienced physical abuse in the past month. Gender was a significant predictor of sexual abuse in Kolda, where the prevalence of sexual abuse among adolescent girls was twofold higher compared to boys (adjusted OR = 2.09, 95 % CI 1.03, 4.23). CONCLUSIONS: Boys in Pikine were more likely to experience emotional violence, and girls in Kolda were at a significantly higher risk of experiencing sexual violence. Prevention and response programs must consider gender and geographic variation to maximize their potential to effectively reduce violence against children.