Gender violence or tradition?: media coverage of child/forced marriage in US newspapers

ABSTRACT

The news media play an important role in influencing public perceptions and raising awareness of an issue. This research analyzes media framing of child/forced marriage through an examination of six US national newspapers over a ten-year period. It probes how narratives are constructed based on issue perception, blame attribution, and protagonist perceptions. It finds that print media has afforded increasing coverage to minimum marriage age legislation in the US. Mediated by advocacy organizations and survivors, the discourse surrounding child marriage has used a thematic frame as a legal issue with the onus on the state to amend laws facilitating child marriage. Forced marriage of adults has been framed as thematic too, but regarded as a cultural imperative. This culturalization of violence prevents forced marriage from being recognized as gender violence. Thus, while the thematic framing is laudable, the type of thematic framing matters, especially concerning blame attribution and the perceptions of protagonists, to fully comprehend this form of gender violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Forced marriage
• child marriage
• media framing
• gender violence

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Robert Bartlett, Stèphanie Wahab and Miriam Abelson for helpful comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The age of majority is 19 in Alabama and Nebraska and 21 in Mississippi, but boys can marry at 17 and girls at 15 with parental consent in Mississippi.

2. While this is a momentous step forward, Congress can close the loop further by setting 18 as the minimum age for marriage-based immigration; currently there is none.

3. The FLDS is a break-away religious sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) or the Mormon Church. It split over the practice of polygamy and its leader Warren Jeffs was convicted of child sexual assault in 2011.

4. Amina Ajmal of Brooklyn, NY, was held prisoner in Pakistan for three years and forced to marry against her will. After she escaped and returned to the US, her father ordered the murders of two individuals who helped her, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy to commit honor killings in 2015 (US Attorney General’s Office 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manjusha Gupte

Manjusha Gupte teaches in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender and public policy, specifically structural violence, the environment and development.

Sundari Anitha

Anitha Sundari is Professor of Gender, Violence and Work at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lincoln, UK. Her research interests lie in the problem of violence against women and girls and gender, race, and ethnicity in employment relations.