‘Safe spaces’ and ‘bad’ girls: ‘child marriage victims’’ experiences from a shelter in Eastern India

Abstract

This article interrogates the politics of safety that underpin rehabilitative practices in a state-funded shelter run by an anti-trafficking NGO in Eastern India. It focuses on the experiences of a group of female adolescents, categorised as ‘child marriage victims’, residing at the shelter. The analysis of in-depth life history interviews collected over a two-week period in October 2014 reveals that the adolescents contest the legislative victimhood imposed on them. For them, their marriages and pre-marital relationships are an expression of romantic and sexual agency, in contravention of familial norms. In this context, the adolescents perceive the shelter as a punitive space and interpret their enforced stay for ‘protection’ and ‘rehabilitation’ as an extension of familial control and regulation of their lives. The protectionism-as-safety discourse rewrites their agency as victimhood and transforms the shelter into a site where everyday forms of gendered power inequalities within social relations in the household are authorised and reproduced by the state and NGO. The adolescents perceive themselves as ‘bad girls’ and adopt various strategies to insist on their rehabilitation into ‘good girls’ to secure release from the shelter often by enacting the ‘victimhood’ expected of them. This allows for unique expressions of agency in an otherwise constrained context but hinders relationships of solidarity with other residents. Overall, the article highlights the need to challenge the ways in which patriarchal norms continue to spatially govern and discipline the expression of female sexuality and agency through 'safe spaces' in India.

Keywords:

• Agency
• child marriage
• safe space
• safety
• shelter
• victimhood

Acknowledgements

My gratitude to the female adolescents who shared their experiences with me during a difficult time in their lives. My gratitude to Sakhi for providing access to the residents of its anti-trafficking shelter, which all other NGO-run shelters in the city denied. Thanks also to its late founder, Ms. Sharma, and its staff for their hospitality and willingness to engage in fruitful debates about the adverse consequences of child marriage legislation on young women. Thank you to the editor of themed section, and for feedback received on a presentation based on this article at the RGS-IBG annual conference held in 2017 in London. Finally, thank you to the University of East Anglia for funding this research.

Note

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All names in this paper have been changed to protect confidentiality of participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Postgraduate Internationalisation Studentship provided by the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of East Anglia.

Notes on contributors

Mirna Guha

Dr. Mirna Guha is Acting Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Her research specialisms include gender-based violence, sex work, social justice, and social relations within marginalised communities. She has a PhD in International Development from the University of East Anglia. In her doctoral research, she explored female sex workers' experiences and negotiations with everyday violence in Eastern India. She has prior experience as a practitioner on gender-based violence and gender inequality with youth in South Asia, and has conducted research on the experiences of male refugees, and on Muslim communities’ perceptions of counter-terrorism interventions in the UK.