As someone who is pretty convinced by the capability approach , one thing that I feel is somewhat missing from this (well done) exercise is a consideration of the foreclosing of options that a child marriage entails for the girl. Even if the girl grows up happy and doesn’t have the problems that you sought out measures for (schooling, experiencing violence), her life options may have been quite massively curtailed by being entered into this hard-to-break legal and social arrangement before she was an adult. I think that alone makes it bad.
I’m not saying I have a way to cost this out in terms of capabilities, but I think this consideration merits attention. My guess is when a lot of us think about what is wrong with child marriage we start with intuitions around “losing options for life” but then our training or norms guides us to things that are easier to measure like “school completion.” That’s not necessarily bad, but I think it would be a mistake to see no effects on the latter and conclude that the former didn’t happen.
Again, thanks for posting this and thanks for the work that went into it.
Thanks for reading and engaging with my post Ryan!
Thanks for raising the capability approach here, I had not heard of it before. Thinking about how child marriage curtails life prospects was one of my personal motivations for looking at this topic in the first place. I was reading The Precipice at the time and thinking about the parallel with the future of humanity being curtailed by existential crises.
I agree that just because losing options for life is somewhat unmeasurable does not mean it is not important. Take this example of Stella, interviewed in a BBC podcast. Stella is a 22 year old woman who as a girl who was helped by a grassroots program in Kenya. She experienced a forced marriage and had a son when she was 11. She is now at university and has a drastically different life, and according to her much better life, than if the program had not intervened.
I do not have a way to include this in my model but I will keep thinking on it. Some things I am considering related to this:
1. Divorce rates are really high (similar to US) in some contexts where there is child marriage, e.g. in Ethiopia, so child marriage can be escaped. Obviously if you have children things are very complicated. Accessibility of family planning can help keep options open for girls to divorce.
2. Many things limit the possibility of people’s options, like being in poverty or growing up in a rural place. These things would have to be considered as confounding variables.
3. I generally have the view that being married would curtail choice, but others may believe that marrying early allows more choice, e.g. better choice of partner within a community, better access to resources and freedoms that come from being an adult in a household rather than a child in your parents’ household. This is a fraught line of reasoning and I am very unsure here. This speaks to some of the criticisms that you note in your post on the capability approach about it being culturally biased towards liberalism.
Thank you for this writeup. I enjoyed reading it.
As someone who is pretty convinced by the capability approach , one thing that I feel is somewhat missing from this (well done) exercise is a consideration of the foreclosing of options that a child marriage entails for the girl. Even if the girl grows up happy and doesn’t have the problems that you sought out measures for (schooling, experiencing violence), her life options may have been quite massively curtailed by being entered into this hard-to-break legal and social arrangement before she was an adult. I think that alone makes it bad.
I’m not saying I have a way to cost this out in terms of capabilities, but I think this consideration merits attention. My guess is when a lot of us think about what is wrong with child marriage we start with intuitions around “losing options for life” but then our training or norms guides us to things that are easier to measure like “school completion.” That’s not necessarily bad, but I think it would be a mistake to see no effects on the latter and conclude that the former didn’t happen.
Again, thanks for posting this and thanks for the work that went into it.
Thanks for reading and engaging with my post Ryan!
Thanks for raising the capability approach here, I had not heard of it before. Thinking about how child marriage curtails life prospects was one of my personal motivations for looking at this topic in the first place. I was reading The Precipice at the time and thinking about the parallel with the future of humanity being curtailed by existential crises.
I agree that just because losing options for life is somewhat unmeasurable does not mean it is not important. Take this example of Stella, interviewed in a BBC podcast. Stella is a 22 year old woman who as a girl who was helped by a grassroots program in Kenya. She experienced a forced marriage and had a son when she was 11. She is now at university and has a drastically different life, and according to her much better life, than if the program had not intervened.
I do not have a way to include this in my model but I will keep thinking on it. Some things I am considering related to this:
1. Divorce rates are really high (similar to US) in some contexts where there is child marriage, e.g. in Ethiopia, so child marriage can be escaped. Obviously if you have children things are very complicated. Accessibility of family planning can help keep options open for girls to divorce.
2. Many things limit the possibility of people’s options, like being in poverty or growing up in a rural place. These things would have to be considered as confounding variables.
3. I generally have the view that being married would curtail choice, but others may believe that marrying early allows more choice, e.g. better choice of partner within a community, better access to resources and freedoms that come from being an adult in a household rather than a child in your parents’ household. This is a fraught line of reasoning and I am very unsure here. This speaks to some of the criticisms that you note in your post on the capability approach about it being culturally biased towards liberalism.