Youth-Adult Marriage

Youth-Adult Marriages (often described with the objectifying and sometimes inaccurate term "child marriage"), have existed throughout history.

EDITOR's NOTES:

Work from [1] and the Wikipedia article to get to a broad understanding of the topic.

[list examples]

[2] [3] [4]

[describe context - legal emancipation of minors, etc]

The incendiary problematics of "child marriage"

As commonly defined, the term "child marriage" has little validity as a legal or ethical construct. It is rather telling that the UN framework and their affiliated NGOs pursue the idea of "child marriage", which may or may not imply arranged marriage and rarely involves children. The "international community" therefore risk abandoning adult women who are subjected to arranged marriages, something which they could make a defensible ethical argument against. After conducting a short literature review, Newgon found widespread evidence of anti "child" (youth-adult) marriage campaigners "overstepping the mark" with respect to their attempts to establish a base of "evidence". Claims made about the effect of "child marriage" on sexual health often recycle old tropes about "teen pregnancy" and unsubstantiated statistics from UN reports. It is impossible to find any evidence that these figures are based upon sound methodology and adequately controlled experimental designs. For example, one such paper (written by an activist Physician with no academic credentials) is used frequently by Wikipedia to make multiple such unsupported claims.

Since many countries have laws in place allowing girls in particular to be married in their mid-teens, the concept also can not be said to have any validity as a global construct. Such marriages are often necessary for economic and cultural reasons. It appears the idea of combating "child marriage" is used to enforce western imperialism and define legal relationships in "lesser" cultures arbitrarily as a form of discrimination or violence against girls and women. The effects of this are to promote adherence to a westernized model of "education" that undermines local/traditional family customs and reduces the ability of communities to resist occupation by western financial elites. This increases their economic dependency upon the US Dollar reserve currency. It is highly unlikely that keeping all girls in education is a "scaleable" or sustainable solution for these economies, at least for as long as they remain US dependencies with little economic independence. This leaves said economies in a "vicious circle" whereby they are left with a "problem" (defined by the west) that can never be solved by the western interventions offered as a solution. The winners in this scenario are western NGOs that seek rent off the back of developing world problems.

Gallery

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  Eunice and Charlie Johns

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  Eunice and Charlie Johns (continued)

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  Eunice and Charlie Johns (continued)

References

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