SOCIAL AND GENDER NORMS AND CHILD MARRIAGE

Relevance:

Sociology: Gender and Emerging issues: ageing, sex ratios, child and infant mortality, reproductive health.
Violence against women

G. S paper 1: society and social issues

Introduction

‘Social norms’ currently figure among the most fashionable topics in social science research. While ‘culture’ was once referenced as a black-box variable by non-anthropologists, the research on social norms has represented an effort to get more precise in concepts and measurement. Still, it means different things to different people and is inconsistently conceptualised and measured.

Analysis

A strong movement to identify and address gender norms has developed alongside and within these efforts to address social norms. An important distinguishing feature of the gender norms work is the understanding of gender as a hierarchical system that sharply disadvantages girls, women and non-conforming men and boys.

Child marriage was one of the first areas of gender related inequalities to which social and gender norms perspectives have been applied. The focus on gender norms in child marriage has reflected an appreciation of how difficult it is for individuals to decide independently to marry later or for their children to marry later, even when they think it is the right thing to do.

The rules of patriarchy underlie most systems of marriage, and an understanding of gender norms is fundamental to explaining and working to end this practice that is so harmful to girls in many parts of the world.

FACTS AND FIGURES

• Child marriage around the world Child, early and forced marriage (abbreviated to ‘child marriage’ or CEFM and viewed as marriage before the age of 18) is a global problem that violates girls’ human rights, curtails their schooling, harms their health, and sharply constrains their futures (UNFPA, 2012; Greene, 2014).
• Young wives’ low status in their marital households can subject them to long hours of labour, social isolation, physical, sexual, and emotional violence, the risks related to early pregnancy, and having little say over anything that affects them (Garcia-Moreno et al., 2005).
• Of course, boys are also negatively affected by denial of choice of marriage partner or timing of marriage and by adult male responsibilities being thrust on them too young.
• But patriarchal power relations mean that within marriage they have greater say, and also do not suffer the negative health effects of early pregnancy.
• Child marriage is most prevalent in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa and in some parts of Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East (UNICEF, 2017).
• In South Asia, almost half of girls marry before age 18, and one in six before age 15. Various regions of Africa follow South Asia in prevalence, with around 40% of women aged 20 to 24 married in childhood.
• In the United States, quite a few states allow marriage before age 18, and some allow exceptions to the age of consent to be made by parents and judges and in cases of pregnancy, enabling girls to marry even younger (McClendon and Sandstrom, 2016).
• Worldwide, more than 650 million women alive today were married before their 18th birthdays, and about 250 million were married before age 15 (UNICEF, 2014: 2).
• Despite many countries adopting minimum age of marriage laws, which themselves codify a set of norms and aspirations, many of these laws allow for exceptions, and/or are commonly violated, meaning their existence alone does not signify an effective tool for shifting the norms underpinning and driving child marriage.
• While legal norms can reflect and drive changes in norms, these norms are, in some cases, actively resisted; furthermore, pluralistic legal systems, widespread exceptions to minimum age laws, and weak law enforcement all combine to limit the role of the law in changing norms about child marriage.

Child marriage is not a norm itself, but reflects other gender and social norms

Social norms underpin systems of marriage globally. Norms underpinning child marriage range across domains of the transition to adulthood, sexuality, age hierarchies, religious beliefs, gender inequality, and women’s and men’s respective economic roles.

The bidirectional relationship between education and child marriage

• Norms regarding education and child marriage are closely intertwined, and these two activities compete in the same stage of girls’ lives. Not surprisingly, cause and consequence are difficult to discern (Lloyd and Mensch, 2008).
• It may appear that girls either drop out of school because they get married or that they get married because they are not in school; in fact, the evidence supports both arguments.
• But rarely does child marriage lead simply and directly to dropping out of school, or vice versa (Brown, 2012).
• Certainly in some settings, the strength of traditional norms may dictate that either marriage or education may be pre-ordained paths for some girls; and in some settings the conventional wisdom in international development, that girls stay in school until marriage forces them out or choose marriage only because there are no educational opportunities, may apply.

But the more common paths to child marriage are likely to be less linear.

• Expectations and intentions around education and marriage are likely to change over time as circumstances change for girls and their families.
• The anticipation of marriage can undermine girls’ school experience and lead them to question the utility of education they may have no opportunity to apply; this can lead to poor performance and dropping out.

The education-child marriage relationship is further complicated by factors such as rural residence and poverty, which correlate with both education and child marriage. For example, rural areas typically have lower access to schools and fewer formal employment opportunities, both of which impact the trade-off between education and marriage for girls. Distance to school raises concerns for parents about the safety of their daughters. Traditional social norms are also typically slower to change in rural areas than urban areas.

This is an area where social norms research has the potential to move the field forward. The same social norms which devalue girls and women as contributors to societies and economies underpin both marriage practices and educational opportunities, regardless of the direction of causality. Perhaps as important as understanding whether girls drop out of school to marry, marry instead of going to school, or follow a more complex path, is understanding the social norms and structural and economic factors that devalue girls’ contributions outside the home.