Where are the debates and differences?

From the prominent place occupied by demography discussed in Chapter 3, this chapter has revealed rather scattered insights with plenty of gaps in other scholarship and disciplines that ought to have thrown more light on child marriage today. Such a state of affairs is not conducive to creating a climate of public interest, involvement or debate. It is among those working on the ground that one can discern differences in point of view, although actual debates are hard to find. Some of these differences were apparent in the discussion in Chapter 3 on the role of the law. There was evident disagreement on the usefulness of making the PCMA criminalizable such that marriage on the part of a girl below the age of 18 would become void ab initio by turning the PCMA into a no-exception law.

It is in reviews and discussions of interventions - mainly by NGOs - that differences can be discerned. Before discussing some examples, let me clarify that I will not be undertaking an evaluation of existing programmes. Some global studies have categorized types of interventions and even attempted to determine which ones are more successful in efforts to address early and child marriage (e.g., Lee-Rife and others 2012; Malhotra and others 2011; UNFPA/UNICEF 2016). But these studies themselves indicate how difficult it is to make evaluations and how few such systematic efforts exist.

For the purposes of this book, what is of interest is that some recent reports on interventions in the Indian context have thrown up clear differences if not disagreements on how to understand the problem of early and child marriage and what approaches are preferable. The first thing one notices is that it is the very focus on age itself that has elicited criticisms. So, for example, in their pioneering landscape analysis of existing interventions, the Nirantar report on early and child marriage distinguishes between two broad approaches: the first is called age-centric and the second empowerment-centric (Nirantar 2015). The report is quite critical of those approaches among NGOs which concentrate primarily on finding ways to delay marriage until the age of 18 and which follow state and developmental targets to show just how many child marriages could be prevented. In their view, such approaches do not address the “root causes” of child marriage. On the other hand, their depiction of the second approach is more attuned to the idea of agency. Interestingly, the Nirantar report also refers to each of these approaches as child-centric and adolescent-centric respectively, which leads them to explicitly argue in favour of the term “early marriage” rather than “child marriage”. Not only does an empowerment approach address itself to the structures of marriage, the control of sexuality, issues of violence and so on, but they also believe that when young people are treated as adolescents rather than children, their capacity to negotiate their futures rather than simply being protected from harm is being addressed (Nirantar 2015).

Another example that takes some of the concerns of the Nirantar report forward is even more directly concerned with interventions and how to assess them. A study by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, led by Meena Gopal, engages with the question of alternative measures of change, which are known as outcome mappings. Here, too, mere focus on age is seen as unduly restrictive. Instead, processes of change through the collectivization of women and girls around core issues - violence, gender and sexuality, education and livelihoods - are the focus. The challenges are therefore of a different order - is it possible to engage at the community level around these issues? Unsurprisingly, many organizations were unable to engage on issues such as sexuality. On the other hand, it was something of a commonplace to hear that girls wanted to marry when they were financially independent (although it was not clear to what extent existing programmes were in a position to actually address this desire) (Gopal and others 2016).

Some organizations have found innovative ways to bring in questions of marriage into their work. A good example is Samvada, based in Bengaluru, which has been undertaking gender and sexuality workshops for broad categories of disadvantaged “youth” for two decades. According to Samvada’s director Anita Ratnam, it was experiences of girls dropping out at different levels of education for marriage, regardless of age, whether due to family pressure or having entered intimate relations of their own, that got them interested in bringing marriage explicitly into their work with young people. Notice, also, that they use the loose term “youth”, addressing all genders (not just girls), some of whom may be well into their twenties. “Marriage preparedness” rather than prevention of child marriage characterizes their approach, which is connected to education, training and sources of livelihood, both rural and urban. These are the contexts for examining forms of gender discrimination and questions of sexuality, which includes addressing those who may already be married or whose marriages have broken (interview with Anita Ratnam and Nitya Vasudevan, March 2017).

Meanwhile, “agency not age” is becoming quite a popular slogan among several organizations in India that combat child marriage, and in all likelihood this would be true elsewhere too. But how is agency being understood and deployed? A recent evaluation of child prevention programmes in two Indian states (West Bengal and Rajasthan) by Renu Khanna on behalf of Haq Centre for Child Rights has commented on the possibilities and limitations of NGO-led programmes of change, which try to work with adolescent girls, with the community and community leaders (often religious leaders) and with the legal and administrative state machinery meant to address child marriage. The evaluation report sponsored by Haq seems to suggest that greater success is to be found in working with girls and that there are many more obstacles at community and state levels. But here, the very “agency” of girls can become hugely tricky. (Many programmes these days include sessions where girls take the stage and speak out against child marriage.) As the report points out, “While it is great to have adolescents recognised as leaders and champions of the issue, how ethical is it to put them in positions of vulnerability?” (Khanna 2019: 26). A particularly problematic aspect in these campaigns is when such girls are made “informers” of a case of early/child marriage in their communities. “What do programme implementers need to do to ensure that human rights defenders are protected and have a support system? There is the additional issue of the conflict between increasing solidarity and trust through adolescent girls’ groups, and asking a few amongst them to turn informers - what does this do to the trust between the girls?” (Khanna 2019: 27). I would like to press further and ask - when NGOs undertake programmes with girls, what kind of follow-up and what support structures are there once they leave? When a child marriage is prevented, what happens afterwards?

Yet another voice to consider in this context is that of Abhijit Das. In a two-part online article, Das (who works in the field of health) asked more confrontationally, why is child marriage a problem? The ages of 18 and 21 years are quite arbitrary in his view. He referred quite positively to his own work in rural contexts with older women who had married in their teens and were quite “vivacious” and “bouncy” and had no signs of trauma or oppression (Das 2018a). He went on to argue that early marriage was but a symptom of a larger problem: the nature of marriage in India, the control of women’s sexuality and notions of honour. Indeed, he likened the marriage system in India to a “breeding transaction between two families of similar social standing”. Das went on to refer to the work of his organization which focusses on men and boys so that sons no longer just represent “lineage” and daughters “honour”. As he put it,

The point I wish to make here is that we do not see early marriage from an external standpoint as a social problem. We work closely with men to help them understand their own relationships with women in the family, in the community and their own beliefs and actions towards others. This helps them look at the world differently and respond differently to the various issues of life.

(Das 2018b)

Although there can be no doubt that it is as central to engage men and boys as it is girls and women, here too there is much more that is left unsaid about the nature of the structure of marriage and its institutional underpinnings.

These examples have been raised to demonstrate some of the contrary voices in a field dominated by demographic and health-related indicators and where the slogan is one of ending child marriage. In my view, there is much, much more that needs to be debated in this context. Better debates will be possible with the help of more robust frames of analysis.