Brief outline of the research study. Please ensure that you include details of the design (qualitative/quantitative, etc) as well as the methods and procedures (questionnaire, interviews, experimental trial, observation, etc).
This research will be conducted as text-based research and will use data from books, including different reports and interviews that already exist in the field of gender studies about child brides in the Yemen.
The research will encapsulate how patriarchy depicts young girls and women in the Yemeni society and identify the complications in the gender roles that encourage child marriages. Furthermore, child marriages legitimise underage rape, yet this rape is acceptable in the patriarchal worldview as long as there is an official marriage contract. Hence that a documentary presented in 2014 in Yemen, highlighted the struggle of women and that young girls were subjected to child marriage practices. In addition, the documentary revealed that over forty percent of marriages involved girls under the age of fifteen and these child brides were often subjected to physical and mental abuse, including sexual violence. Moreover, many girls died due to underage sex that caused internal damage including childbirth complications or, in other situations, attempts by the girls to commit suicide.
This is a sensitive subject and many girls do not contest the child marriage practice due to many reasons the prime reason is that when the bride is a child she is spoken for by her parents, and she has no power to voice her objections. Furthermore, socioeconomics plays a crucial role in a torn country torn by war with blockades and poverty and all these factors can primarily drive parents to marry off their daughters young, in order for their daughters to be cared for and fed.
Another factor is that the Yemeni society encourages marriage as a part of the social fabric in the Yemeni society, therefore, women must produce children to hold their father’s name in the Yemeni tribal structure.
Tribally, its honourable to produce a large family, thus, the more male children a family has the more respected and secure the family becomes because male children will grow to be productive workers in the society and their tribes alike, and they can fight in wars if required or work outside the home.
Therefore, women are seen as tools of production and their role is to produce children for their husbands in order to keep the family stable and rooted in their society’s social structure. Hence, as outlined above, the Yemeni woman’s burden is that she must endure all these factors to fulfil her productive role as required from her by patriarchy. This research will explore the meaning of marriage in the Yemeni society and what the effects are of child marriages and how women endure.
