Women's Refugee Commission, 15 W 37th Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY, 10019, USA.
Independent Research Consultant, Harare, Zimbabwe.
BMC Public Health. 2024 Jan 2;24(1):13. doi: 10.1186/s12889-023-17408-7.
Child marriage is a global crisis underpinned by gender inequality and discrimination against girls. A small evidence base suggests that food insecurity crises can be both a driver and a consequence of child marriage. However, these linkages are still ambiguous. This paper aims to understand how food insecurity influences child marriage practices in Chiredzi, Zimbabwe.
Mixed methods, including participant-led storytelling via SenseMaker® and key informant interviews, were employed to examine the relationship between food insecurity and child marriage within a broader context of gender and socio-economic inequality. We explored the extent to which food insecurity elevates adolescent girls' risk of child marriage; and how food insecurity influences child marriage decision-making among caregivers and adolescents. Key patterns that were generated by SenseMaker participants' interpretations of their own stories were visually identified in the meta-data, and then further analyzed. Semi-structured guides were used to facilitate key informant interviews. Interviews were audio-recorded, and transcribed and translated to English, then imported into NVivo for coding and thematic analysis.
A total of 1,668 community members participated in SenseMaker data collection, while 22 staff participated in interviews. Overall, we found that food insecurity was a primary concern among community members. Food insecurity was found to be among the contextual factors of deprivation that influenced parents' and adolescent girls' decision making around child marriage. Parents often forced their daughters into marriage to relieve the household economic burden. At the same time, adolescents are initiating their own marriages due to limited alternative survival opportunities and within the restraints imposed by food insecurity, poverty, abuse in the home, and parental migration. COVID-19 and climate hazards exacerbated food insecurity and child marriage, while education may act as a modifier that reduces girls' risk of marriage.
Our exploration of the associations between food insecurity and child marriage suggest that child marriage programming in humanitarian settings should be community-led and gender transformative to address the gender inequality that underpins child marriage and address the needs and priorities of adolescent girls. Further, programming must be responsive to the diverse risks and realities that adolescents face to address the intersecting levels of deprivation and elevate the capacities of adolescent girls, their families, and communities to prevent child marriage in food insecure settings.
童婚是一个全球性危机，其根源是性别不平等和对女孩的歧视。有限的证据表明，粮食不安全危机既可能是童婚的驱动因素，也可能是其后果。然而，这些关联仍然不明确。本文旨在了解津巴布韦奇雷济的粮食不安全如何影响童婚习俗。
采用混合方法，包括通过 SenseMaker®进行的以参与者为主导的讲故事和关键知情人访谈，以更广泛的性别和社会经济不平等背景来研究粮食不安全与童婚之间的关系。我们探讨了粮食不安全在多大程度上增加了少女童婚的风险；以及粮食不安全如何影响照顾者和青少年的童婚决策。通过 SenseMaker 参与者对自己故事的解释生成的主要模式在元数据中进行了可视化识别，然后进一步进行了分析。使用半结构化指南来促进关键知情人访谈。访谈进行了录音，并翻译成英文，然后导入 NVivo 进行编码和主题分析。
共有 1668 名社区成员参加了 SenseMaker 数据收集，22 名工作人员参加了访谈。总体而言，我们发现粮食不安全是社区成员的主要关注点之一。粮食不安全是导致父母和青少年在童婚决策中考虑的剥夺性背景因素之一。父母经常为了减轻家庭经济负担而强迫女儿结婚。与此同时，青少年由于缺乏替代生存机会，以及受到粮食不安全、贫困、家庭虐待和父母迁移的限制，自己也在主动结婚。COVID-19 和气候灾害使粮食不安全和童婚加剧，而教育可能会降低女孩结婚的风险。
我们对粮食不安全与童婚之间的关联进行的探讨表明，在人道主义环境中开展的童婚方案应该以社区为导向并具有性别变革性，以解决童婚背后的性别不平等问题，并满足青少年的需求和优先事项。此外，方案必须对青少年面临的各种风险和现实情况做出反应，以解决多种剥夺现象，并增强青少年、其家庭和社区在粮食不安全环境中防止童婚的能力。
