Peer-reviewed article
‘Safe spaces’ and ‘bad’ girls: ‘child marriage victims’’ experiences from a shelter in Eastern India
Mirna Guha ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examines how adolescent girls labelled as 'child marriage victims' experience a state-funded shelter in Eastern India. The girls interviewed contest being defined as victims and see their marriages as expressions of their own choice. They perceive the shelter as punishment rather than protection, and experience it as an extension of family control over their sexuality and behaviour. The study shows that shelters designed to protect girls can reproduce the same gender-based restrictions they claim to escape.
Key points
- Adolescents categorised as 'child marriage victims' contest the victimhood label imposed on them and view their marriages as expressions of romantic and sexual agency
- Girls perceive the shelter as a punitive space and interpret enforced stay as an extension of familial control rather than genuine protection
- The shelter reproduces gendered power inequalities from the household, with state and NGO authority replacing family authority
- Girls adopt strategies to perform the 'victimhood' expected of them in order to secure release from the shelter
- Patriarchal norms continue to govern and discipline female sexuality through 'safe spaces' policies in India
Limitations
This study is based on life history interviews collected over two weeks in one shelter setting, which limits generalisability to other shelters, regions, or countries. The cross-sectional design does not track how girls' perceptions or circumstances change over time.
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.