by Esther Miedema, Winny Koster and Nicky Pouw
-Progress in Development Studies
Young
women’s health and educational attainment is broadly seen as fundamental to sustainable
development and economic progress. In recent years, the international development
community has directed particular attention to the practice of ‘child marriage,’
defined as that which takes place before one or both spouses have reached the
age of 18.
A central
premise of many campaigns and interventions against child marriage is that the
young people involved are coerced into marrying, and that marriage generally comes
at a severe cost to young people’s physical and mental wellbeing, their
educational attainment and ability to break cycles of poverty.
Child
marriage has been found to disproportionately affect young women in the Global
South. In International development circles, young women exercising their right
to refuse an early marriage is often regarded as an indication of their
empowerment, their ‘no’ a cause for celebration. By the same token, young women
who agree to a marriage or choose to marry before the age of 18 are regarded as
‘vulnerable’ and not having had a choice. Consequently, resolving the issue of
child marriage is commonly framed in terms of ‘empowering’ girls, and teaching
girls, families and communities about the negative consequences of child
marriage.
This Special
Issue (SI) seeks to contribute to debates on child marriage by offering a grounded
understanding of the rationales underpinning such marriages in a range of
contexts in the Global South. In so doing, we recognize that funding schemes and
growing demands to demonstrate impact do not sit comfortably with emphases on
nuance and context that often characterizes academic research. However, by
shedding light on the complexity of structural drivers of child marriage and by
complicating simplified conceptions of choice, we hope to elicit discussion on
the limitations of focusing only on girls and families as sites of intervention,
and of programmatic emphases on individual choice and countering harmful
‘traditions’. Finally, in different ways, the various contributions highlight
the importance of moving beyond the view of child marriage as always and
unvaryingly harmful, thereby supporting calls for more research and
interventions that do justice to young women and families’ choices.
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