Peer-reviewed article
Violence against Adolescent Girls: Impact of Harmful Socio-Cultural Practices
Parveen Pannu ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This paper examines harmful socio-cultural practices that affect adolescent girls in India, including early marriage, female genital mutilation, virginity testing, and practices related to menstruation. The author argues these practices, deeply rooted in cultural traditions, cause significant harm including death, disability, and psychological damage. The paper is a literature review aimed at raising awareness and encouraging stakeholders to address these culturally sanctioned harms affecting adolescent girls' wellbeing.
Key points
- Harmful traditional practices against adolescent girls in India include FGM, early marriage, adolescent pregnancy, prescribed dress codes, menstruation-related practices, marriage by abduction, and virginity testing
- These practices lead to death, disabilities, and physical and psychological dysfunction for millions of women annually
- The adolescent phase of an Indian female child is marked with brutal violence
- These practices are considered accepted cultural norms despite their harmful impact
- The paper addresses a scholarly gap and aims to bring the issue into mainstream discussion among stakeholders
Limitations
This is a literature review based on secondary sources and newspaper articles rather than primary data collection, so it cannot quantify the prevalence of these practices or measure their specific impacts on individual girls. The review does not present an evaluation of any interventions to address these harms.
Abstract
Harmful traditional practices are the types of violence that have historically been committed against women in general and certain communities and societies for so long that these abuses are considered a part of accepted cultural practice. These may lead to death, disabilities, and physical and psychological dysfunction for millions of women annually. This paper focuses on the harmful socio-cultural practices impacting adolescent girl’s wellbeing and mortality at the adolescent phase of her life. This phase of an Indian female child is marked with brutal violence. It attempts to bring awareness of the selected harmful socio-cultural practices that impact adolescent girls such as FGM, early marriage, adolescent pregnancy, dress codes prescribed by the society, practices related to menstruation and related health and hygiene issues, marriage by abduction, and virginity testing. This paper gives an informative overview of the harmful practices rooted in our socio-cultural milieu from secondary review of literature and articles published in leading English daily newspapers. It aims to fulfil a scholarly gap in research on this issue as well as to bring it in mainstream discussion among the different stakeholders so as to tackle the issue of the culturally sanctioned harmful practices impacting adolescents’ girls.