ABSTRACT
Discussions about education inevitably lead to conversations about youth and national/societal progress. Similarly, conversations about societal development point to educated youth as harbingers of future prosperity. Indeed, youth have served across different moments in history as the social space where cultural anxieties and hopes for the future have been discussed and debated, and educational projects are often perceived as instruments for molding young people into productive citizens (see Mitchell, 2003). The concepts of youth, education, and societal progress, hence, stick together. I take this formation as a point of investigation into the recent education policy discourses in which exhortations for girls’ education in the Global South are accompanied by outcries against ‘child marriages,’ which are assumed to be prevalent in these societies. In recent decades transnational development organizations, such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF), and philanthropist/activist groups, such as the Office of Gordon and Sarah Brown, Girls Not Brides, and Human Rights Watch, have embarked upon campaigns against child marriages, arguing that marrying girls at young ages disrupts their education, leads to health-related problems, and thus constitutes a violation of their human rights. Without minimizing the material ways in which practices of child marriage are harmful to young bodies, and acknowledging the difficulties of engaging in dialogues about children from a critical perspective due to discourses of protection and innocence that surround them (Baird, 2008), this chapter attends to the ideological and symbolic functioning of the discourse on child marriage. Why does there exist a proliferation of writing, funding opportunities, and projects around child marriage in recent decades? What kinds of ideas, histories, and assumptions does this body of work rely on to take its force? What possibilities of thought and action does it promote and which ones does it foreclose?
