Mass marriage ceremony in Madhya Pradesh, India, in 2012. Devendra Dube/Demotix. All Rights Reserved.
Early marriage is a recent entrant into the discourse and advocacy around modern slavery. It is compared to slavery because it entails a lack of informed consent, an inability to leave the marriage, and enforced domesticity. The interest in early marriage—and indeed the shift in terminology from ‘child’ to ‘early’—also stems from the sudden focus on the adolescent girl in development (the ‘girl effect’). Major development agencies in partnership with corporations are increasingly singling out the adolescent girl as key to economic growth and poverty eradication in low-income countries. In order for adolescent girls to fill this role, these activists say, risky ‘cultural’ practices like early marriage must be addressed.
Causes for early marriage
In the rhetoric around both modern slavery and development, culture and tradition become substitutes for understanding power relations and the structural factors determining the status of women and girls in the global south. It is, after all, easier to ‘save’ women from culture than it is to truly appraise and redress the feminisation of poverty, only one of the complex causes of underdevelopment.
