ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Girls engaging in activism to end child marriage in Sierra Leone: Negotiating power, interacting with others and redefining their own lives
Patricio Cuevas-Parra,
Yan Zhu,
Corresponding Author
Patricio Cuevas-Parra
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Correspondence
Patricio Cuevas-Parra, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Email: [email protected]
Search for more papers by this authorPatricio Cuevas-Parra,
Yan Zhu,
Corresponding Author
Patricio Cuevas-Parra
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Correspondence
Patricio Cuevas-Parra, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Email: [email protected]
Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
Children's right to participate has been one of the most challenging rights to implement due to dominant norms which position children under adults' authority. Notably, this has more negatively impacted girls than boys due to traditional gender norms and practices that often restrict girls' agency and are reproduced and unchallenged in many societies. To contest these struggles, young female activists (13–17 years) in Sierra Leone, who are the focus of this paper, engaged in direct actions to influence public decision-making and prevent girls from being married during childhood. Drawing upon empirical evidence exploring the girls' activism experiences, this article explore, young female activists' practical work is an example of what intersectionality as praxis means by connecting social categories to inequalities and highlights that they saw themselves as social actors with the ability to negotiate power, take part in community-based activism to end child marriage and network with others to seek justice for practices and attitudes they perceived to be abusive.
Open Research
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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