Primary Submission Category: Gender
Missing pieces: A Critical Review of Social Science Research on Forced Marriage
Authors: Jessie Ford Jennifer Hirsch
Presenting Author: Aarushi Shah*
This article highlights an urgent need to better understand the social and structural drivers of forced marriage in the US. In recent decades there has been increased media and research attention to forced marriage. However, much of this work has positioned the phenomenon as a problem of backwards culture or religion—a problem of black and brown girls/women which requires (or justifies) intervention. This review article critically evaluates recent social science literature on forced marriage. We conducted a scoping review, synthesizing and critiquing 22 articles on forced marriage, with an emphasis on gaps in understanding. Our analysis shows a heavy focus on individual circumstances with less attention to structural drivers, on forced entrance to marriage rather than on the forces that prevent exit, on the consequences of forced marriage for forced sex and reproduction, and on heterosexual women to the exclusion of queer individuals, heterosexual men, and those with disabilities. It also points to how forced marriage has been mobilized to amplify orientalizing narratives about Muslim immigrants. We find there are limits to legal definitions of force and coercion (which require an individual perpetrator of that force) and which present a binary framework (forced/not forced) which does not fully capture complex subjective experiences. Interventions emphasize preventing forced marriage rather than helping people in these marriages and/or supporting their exit. Overall, the reviewed literature demonstrates the opportunity of applying a post-carceral framework to this social problem and the need for more qualitative studies based in first-person accounts of forced-marriage with a focus on the social structures and processes that produce, enable and impose forced marriage.