Feminist Conception Of Child Marriage

While the legal instruments outright declare child marriage to be unacceptable, ground reality is largely different. The institution of child marriage is rankled by contradictions – when consensual sex with girls below a minimum age constitutes statutory rape, the same act with a similar aged girl goes unsanctioned by the protective mantle of “marriage”. Child marriage is clearly in violation of the rights of the girl child, who, by law, is entitled to be free from all forms of discrimination, degrading treatment, slavery and exploitation. The weft of legal provisions that emanate from international human rights law, constitutional guarantees of gender equality and gender friendly law offer these rights, but sadly, implementation is lacking.

Consequently, law and its implementation are replicated in the male image while the feminist methodology is missing.

Feminist methodology is essentially capable of projecting feminist narratives in a manner most befitting lawmaking processes, so that they become central to the process of lawmaking. Lawmaking and the interpretation of laws excluding a gender perspective are myopic to a large extent, in that they fail to understand the reality of women’s lives, and the effect that laws have on them. On the other hand, the extant legal regime, though can be adapted despite the lack of feminist mindset pruning it, is barely implemented.

The astute lack of translation from document to practice renders the law toothless, and as good as non-existent. There is a lot of potential, though, for the multiple and deviant streams of law to come together to form a convergent means prevention and punishment of child marriage. Despite the downside, there is plenty of pragmatism in couching concerns about child marriage in human rights principles. It guarantees a means to legitimize strong penalties for violations of laws and policies that can prevent child marriage. The issue, by being founded as a human rights violation, is raised as a grave public concern rather than a private matter between

Although child marriage is seen as a way to escape the cycle of poverty, child marriage in fact worsens the cycle of intergenerational poverty. In depriving a girl of education, they invariably deprive future generations of education, except for some rare exceptions that are too few and far between to become the norm. The deprivation of a girl of education sparks off a cycle, where because of her illiteracy, her family tends towards illiteracy. Invariably, the girl child of today is tomorrow’s mother - as a mother, she is effectively her child’s first teacher. If she is educated, she can give offer her children a sound