Framing child marriage Sample Clauses

Framing child marriage. In every campaign about girls’ empowerment, the elimination of child marriage is cited as one of the best solutions to the problems faced by girls. The period in which the movement against child marriage gained momentum overlaps fully with the history of the “girling of development.” As mentioned in the first chapter, child marriage has been a focus of international treaties and agreements since well before the movement got underway. It also gained some recognition in the late 1990s following the Beijing 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women. The differences in the period after 2008 are the global and unified character of the movement as well as the framing of child marriage. Similar to the framing of girls as saviors and victims simultaneously, key players of the movement against child marriage justify their opposition to it on two bases: moral and instrumental. Moral justifications against child marriage are more characteristic of the period before 2008, while instrumental justifications are more prominent in post-2008 period. Instrumental justifications are arguably helpful to bring global attention to the issue due to reasons I will discuss in the next chapter. As I discussed in the first chapter, in the 1990s, child marriage was mainly framed as a human’s rights issue from within the “harmful cultural practices” perspective. With reference to the earlier international treaties such as CEDAW and the CRC, the devastating effects of child marriage on women’s and children’s rights were highlighted by the few international organizations working on the issue. Xxxxxxxxx (2005) discusses the history of the international feminist movement’s involvement with child marriage. Her study covers the period from the 1920s to 2005 but mainly discusses the interwar period, when a small number of British and Indian feminists problematized child marriage as a form of sexual slavery and a form of control of female body. However, Xxxxxxxxx argues, those feminists were marginalized; the majority of feminists did not take up the issue. For Xxxxxxxxx, the reason for the reluctance to problematize child marriage was concern over being deemed imperialists who did not respect national self- determination. In the interwar period, both British state officials and feminists conceptualized marriage as a private affair and a conjugal right. Xxxxxxxxx argues that the only feminists problematizing child marriage at the time were a few self-identified lesbian feminists who were marginal...