Girlhood Studies

This issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is the second of two Special Issues on the ways in which marriage and pregnancy continue to intervene in the lives of girls and young women. Part One (18:2), a Special Issue on early pregnancy and young motherhood, guest edited by Doris Kakaru and Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo, focusses mostly on Uganda but also ranges from Kenya and Tanzania to 18th Century London, United Kingdom. Issue 18: 3, guest edited by Boroka Godley and Lisa Wiebesiek, takes up Child, Early and Forced Marriages and Unions (CEFMU) across Zimbabwe, South Africa, Turkey, Venezuela, Indonesia, Nepal, Iran, and Brazil. Coinciding with the recent commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the publishing of these two issues offers an impressive collection of new scholarship about pregnancy, young motherhood, and forced and early marriage, coming at a time when governments around the world are recognizing the gains and the ongoing challenges in the struggle to achieve gender equality, and when evidence through scholarly research is so needed in the area of Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights. These two Special Issues align with the official theme of the 2025 International Day of the Girl, celebrated on 11 October, as does the title of this editorial—“The Girl I Am, The Change I Lead: Girls on the Frontlines of Crisis.” Furthermore, Plan International, as one of the key NGOs working on girls’ education, is taking as its focus for the 2025 International Day of the Girl the ending of child marriage.

Child, Early and Forced Marriage, and Unions (CEFMU) can perhaps most usefully be thought of as an umbrella term for a variety of practices related to formal and/or informal unions in which at least one member of the couple is under the age of 18. CEFMU is recognised widely as a violation of human rights and a significant public health issue and has long been a focus of international development.

In this article, we explore the sociocultural constraints that undermine rural adolescent girls’ agency in resisting early child marriage in a gender-unequal context in Zimbabwe. Drawing on interviews with 20 rural high school girls aged 14 to 17, we analyze how intersecting forces—patriarchal authority, family control, economic precarity, and institutional complicity curtail girls’ autonomy. Findings reveal how fear of familial rejection, the lack of safe spaces, the silencing of girls’ voices, and the normalization of early child marriage converge to limit resistance. The involvement of authority figures in abuse, cultural responses to early pregnancy, and limited access to information further intensify girls’ vulnerability. Dismantling early child marriage requires transformative interventions that challenge patriarchal norms and foster collective empowerment in structurally marginalized rural sub-Saharan Africa.

Drawing on data generated during my doctoral study that involved using participatory visual methodology to work with 15 girls in a rural community in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, I describe and discuss a cellphilm produced by them that focuses on early and forced marriage in their community. I demonstrate how such methodology can enable girls and young women to communicate effectively their complex and nuanced understandings of such marriage and the social and material factors that influence continued support for it. I identify three key learnings drawn from the cellphilm and argue that learning about this practice from those affected by it is invaluable to the design of policy and programming that addresses early and forced marriage in ways that are responsive, relevant, sustainable, and effective.

The Turkish legal system stipulates that people under 18 are children and prohibits what is called child marriage. For decades the Turkish state has been striving to eliminate early marriages, whether forced or voluntary. Mainstream media labels underage girls who marry unofficially as child brides, a term that evokes negative associations including child abuse, backwardness, and pathologized sexuality. A group of underage girls, however, claim to have married of their own volition and call themselves Early Marriage Sufferers since they suffer because of the existing legislation regulating the age of marriage. I explore the topography of early marriages in Turkey through the media coverage of this movement in relation to the role it plays in the political antagonisms between secularists and conservationists in this society.

There is limited understanding of the underlying contributing factors to child marriage and the unique challenges faced by girls affected in the context of Venezuela's ongoing geopolitical and economic crisis. To bridge this knowledge gap, we employed an inductive approach to identify themes derived from 89 first and third person narratives, collected in 2022, about female Venezuelan migrants/refugees in child marriages/informal unions in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. Prominent themes included insecurity—pre-, during and post-migration—as well as the loss of support networks that contributed to their forming informal unions, experiencing intimate partner violence, and enduring multifaceted challenges related to motherhood and migration for economic purposes. Understanding the experiences of early marriage/unions during migration is critical to preventing child marriage and better supporting affected girls.

Legislating the minimum marriage age is promoted globally to address the disproportionate impact of child marriage on girls. This strategy, pursued in Indonesia since the 1920s, culminated in the 2019 law legislating the same minimum age for girls and boys. The existing literature establishing that this reform has not been fully effective overlooks the extent to which unresolved challenges from previous law reform attempts have contributed to this ineffectiveness. Demonstrated from a historical perspective, I argue that reform attempts, even the revolutionary ones, have failed to overcome the intersection of child marriage with religious beliefs. Consequently, complex dilemmas in addressing child marriage, arising from this intersection, are inevitable. Developing and implementing law reform strategies without engaging with the relevant historical context may prove particularly challenging.

Marriage in which one or both partners are under 20 years of age is considered child marriage in Nepal. In rural villages here, parents are the primary decision-makers behind their children's marriage. I conducted a qualitative study in the central-southern region of Nepal in which I explored the factors that drive parents to marry off their daughters whether they are underage or not. I conducted 25 focus group discussions and an equal number of key informant interviews with parents of girls aged 15 to 18. My findings demonstrate that parents view ensuring a daughter's marriage as their parental duty that is essential to maintaining their social reputation and is also the solution to their fear of a daughter self-initiating her marriage.

Globally, Iran ranks tenth in the prevalence of female child marriage. Using quantitative secondary analysis of vital statistics data, I examine the role of ethnicity, religion, and development in this phenomenon from 2013 to 2021 since 1,199,271 child marriages were registered during this period. Although religion and development are linked to child marriage, the association is not definitive; some developed provinces show high rates, while less developed western areas have the lowest and the prevalence varies in Sunni and Shiite regions. Ethnicity appears to be the most consistent factor. Ethnic groups of Baluch, Turk, Arab, Turkman, and Persian in Khorasan have the highest ratios. This suggests that development alone cannot reduce child marriage; social, cultural, and religious dynamics need to be considered.

In this review I examine existing international research on Child, Early, and Forced Marriage and Unions. Through a review of 21 academic research articles based on quantitative and qualitative studies published between 2000 and 2025, I consider the extent to which feminist approaches such as intersectionality, reflexivity, gender transformation, and interdisciplinarity operate in the examination of this harmful practice. I argue for the value of explicitly feminist approaches to further inquiry into this issue that place those affected by the practice at the center of the research and resituate them as experts on the subject matter and active agents of social change who may contribute to the eradication of this practice.