Mapping the literature on child marriage: A critical engagement

Abstract

U.S. "child marriage"-marriage including at least one person under the age of 18-is legal and practiced in 44 states. In this article, I map the existing literature on child marriage and offer insights on how child marriage can expand our sociological understandings of marriage, gender inequality, and youth sexualities. Social scientists have almost exclusively focused on child marriage in the Global South at the expense of understanding child marriage in the Global North, which I argue reinforces racist and xenophobic narratives that cast child marriage as a non-Western social problem. The research on U.S. child marriage that does exist focuses on the consequences, rather than the causes, of child marriage, which may shift focus away from a structural understanding of how intersecting inequalities shape girls' likelihood of getting married as minors. I position a sociology of U.S. child marriage at the intersection of sociological understandings of marriage and gender inequality and critical research on youth sexualities. I conclude by calling for intersectional research on U.S. child marriage that builds on these literatures, examining how girls' sexualities are racialized, gendered, and classed within the institution of marriage.

Association between child, early, and forced marriage and extreme weather events: A mixed-methods systematic review

“…This must include experiences of gender non-conforming people, hitherto neglected in gender-based violence and CEFM scholarship. Quantitative and qualitative studies in this area can illuminate pathways, causes, and hidden contexts (O’Quinn, 2021) and assess short- and long-term psychosocial and life course effects. Resources should be directed toward establishing national and granular datasets across country contexts tracking marriage data for accurate measures of CEFM.…”

Social Capital in Social Construction: In-Depth Investigation of Early Marriages in Bawean Island, Indonesia

“…The consensus is that the opportunity to study particular social phenomena in depth allows social scientists to advance our empirical understanding of social life (Feagin, 2020). Early marriage is also a realm of sociological study (O'Quinn, 2021), so this research was conducted on three fundamental social constructions: externalization (selfadaptation), objectivation (self-interaction), and internalization (self-identification) (Berger, 1994;Berger, 2013;Berger & Luckmann, 2013).…”