Anglia Ruskin Research Online (ARRO)
Browse
Guha_2019.pdf (380.35 kB)

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

Download (380.35 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2023-08-30, 16:12 authored by Mirna Guha
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.

History

Refereed

  • Yes

Volume

26

Issue number

1

Page range

128-144

Publication title

Gender, Place and Culture

ISSN

1360-0524

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

File version

  • Accepted version

Language

  • eng

Legacy posted date

2019-04-08

Legacy creation date

2019-04-08

Legacy Faculty/School/Department

Faculty of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

Usage metrics

    ARU Outputs

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC