Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe high prevalence of child marriage in many South Asian countries is usually attributed to poverty, lack of access to education and economic opportunities and gender inequitable cultural norms. Yet in Bangladesh, despite economic growth, mass female education and concerted efforts to eliminate child marriage, its prevalence remains very high. This paper explores community-level perceptions, attitudes and practices relating to child marriage in a rural setting in Bangladesh with the aim of understanding the collective discourses of child marriage in the country and identify the factors shaping these. The study was based on exploratory sequential mixed-method research, with qualitative data collected through group discussions and interviews with 64 participants and quantitative survey data from 3344 participants from the Rangpur district of northern Bangladesh in 2014. The findings suggest that, in addition to the already identified drivers, the notion of a 'good match', where the wife is subservient to her husband, is one of the main motivations for marrying off girls early in this region of Bangladesh. Reducing poverty and educating girls may not be adequate to address the persistent problem of child marriage in all Bangladeshi contexts and emphasis needs to be given to transforming the prevailing idea of a 'good match' to one of an 'equal match'.

With many cities in the Global South experiencing immense growth in informal settlements, city authorities frequently try to assert control over these settlements and their inhabitants through coercive measures such as threats of eviction, exclusion, blocked access to services and other forms of structural violence. Such coercive control is legitimized through the discursive formation of informal settlements as criminal and unsanitary, and of the residents as migrants and as temporary and illegitimate settlers. Using findings from ethnographic research carried out in two informal settlements in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this article explores how informal settlement residents engage with and resist territorial stigma in a rapidly growing Southern megacity. Findings show residents resist stigmatising narratives of neighbourhood blame by constructing counternarratives that frame informal settlements as a "good place for the poor." These place-based narratives emerge from shared experiences of informality and associational life in a city where such populations are needed yet unwanted. While residents of these neighbourhoods are acutely aware of the temporariness and illegality of unauthorised settlements, these narratives produce solidarities to resist eviction and serve to legitimise their claim to the city.