I found three sources that focus on young people feeling powerless in child marriages. Children, mainly girls, don’t have a say when they are being forced into a marriage that has them become pregnant and ends in divorce. I believe that these situations presented in the articles fit into the powerlessness definition because children lack authority and power against the adults that keep them. If they don’t want to do something that the adult wants to do, then the adult can tell or persuade them into doing the action. Children are taught from an early age to respect their elders and superiors. Since children don’t know right from wrong yet, they are going to respect their elders even in an objectively wrong situation. Most of the time the adults don’t let the children talk to other people unless spoken to, and this doesn’t allow for proper social development because they don’t know the social ques or how to properly interact with another human being.
All of the changes from these marriages come so quickly that the girls can’t keep up. When they become pregnant, they aren’t fully developed at that young age so the pregnancy is already complicated. Also, the girls don’t have the proper guidance on how to be a great wife or mother at that age because that isn’t something that they shouldn’t even be focusing on at that point in life. Being married and becoming pregnant at a young age is a mess and the girls involved feel powerless because they can’t speak for themselves and have to respect the adult.
Adding my blog post here just in case.
