Visualising the impact of Child, Early and Forced Marriage and Unions on adolescent girls in the North of Brazil

• In Event: Girls and Young Women Driving Gender Transformation in Rural Spaces in Global South Contexts

Proposal

This paper examines how adolescent girls’ lived experiences of in rural Northern Brazil can be examined through participatory visual methods. The country of Brazil, which has 4th highest rate of CEFMU globally, with over 36% of girls married before their 18th birthday, and the highest rate of the practice in Latin America, has been largely understudied. The rate of CEFMU is disproportionately high for adolescents living in the north and northeast of the country, where inequality is high in rural areas and most of population lives below the poverty line (Losavio, 2020). CEFMU is intrinsically linked to education and is both a cause and a consequence of a lack of participation in education: the majority of married girls are not in school and limited educational opportunities have been shown to encourage girls to marry at an earlier age (CEBRAP et al, 2006; Taylor et al, 2015). Although the Brazilian government has made a significant attempt to tackle educational inequalities and to reduce the practice of CEFMU (Article 1520 of Act 13.811 – 2019), girls in northern Brazil continue to have lower average rates of schooling and educational outcomes than their male peers, and the trend of CEFMU persists (OECD, 2023). Drawing inspiration Nyariro et al.’s (2017) Photovoice research and Mitchell et al., 2018’s drawing research, this research shall explore how these participatory visual methods can be used to place adolescent girls at the centre of the research and to understand their lived experience of the practice. Thus, it shifts the focus away from the researcher, and on to the participant. This paper shall explore how drawing and Photovoice research may allow participants to reflect upon gender norms, cultural and societal expectations for adolescent girls, and to express themselves in a myriad of ways (Mitchell et al., 2018). The manner in which the research design and process could take into consideration the situations, requirements, responsibilities, and desires of the participants will be interrogated. In addition, this paper will detail how the research design will take account for the researcher’s positionality, which is differs vastly for that of the participants. Overall this paper seeks to examine how participatory visual methods may be used as a tool in gender transformative research with adolescent girls in addressing wider social change in disadvantaged and rural areas.

Author

• Boroka Godley, McGill University