Binary Framing of Consent and Coercion of Child Marriage: A Critique

Abstract

The rhetoric around child marriage continues to be framed in binary terms, with the difference between ‘arranged’ and ‘love’ marriages hinging on the concept of consent.1 The context in which consent is constructed, however, remains less explored. ‘Lack of consent’ is a very hard concept to define. Most studies tend to focus on the support for, and history of, victims of non-consent (Abu Amara, Guiné, and Hamel 2013) rather than seeking to define it, since the research concerns women who report being the victims of forced marriage. Overall, the concept of consent has been left relatively undefined and understudied. It is important to rectify this and collectively agree to what constitutes affirmative consent, so we can truly know how far theory and practice coincide, and whether genuine consent is truly possible within the institutions of poverty and marriage. In this chapter, we examine the socio-cultural construction of consent, especially with regard to early or child marriage,2 and the intersecting structural inequalities that constrain particular groups of young women in the urban slums of Bangladesh. As Nicole-Claude Mathieu (1985) rightly pointed out, ‘giving in is not the same as consenting’; similarly, our analysis of 65 qualitative interviews with adolescent girls and young women also suggests that consenting to marriage is almost never free of degrees of socio-cultural obligations, control of sexuality, persuasion, pressure, threat and force from different actors. We explore a range of situations where young women yield to social pressures and consent to marriage. However, ‘pressure’ in this context is not necessarily limited to violence or intimidation, but rather marriage as a norm that cannot be challenged. The girls attribute their early marriages and lack of alternatives to circumstances ‘beyond their control’. The affection and trust that they felt for their parents prevented them from labelling their obligations as coercion. On the other hand, there are cases of girls who claimed to have been ‘forced to consent’ to marry their boyfriends who would have otherwise ‘committed suicide’. These narratives warrant contextualisation to determine the consent–coercion continuum.