Pushing the Boundaries or Pulling the Norms: An Exploratory Study on the Cases of ‘Child Marriages’ in Turkiye

Abstract

From the perspectives of the interviewees, this research studies the role of ‘traditions’ in child marriage as a social and cultural phenomenon in Turkey. This exploratory study focuses on the ‘narratives’ of a group of Turkish women who married in their childhood. These sorts of marriages are one of the hot topics of sociology and social policy as an interdisciplinary academic field. There has been a profound change concerning attitudes towards marriages over the last years: even for those from conservative families, there is no hesitation in saying that ‘culture’ and ‘norms’ radically shaped marriages in the past, resulting in a child or early marriage. As stated, the results suggest that marriage patterns have been changing radically. This shift from past to present concerning marriage patterns results from many parameters like technological progress, improvements in education, social media, urbanization, the usage of popular culture outlets such as TV programs, talk shows, documentaries, platforms like Netflix, Disney Plus, and so on. However, early marriage still occurs in particular regions of the country. The present study details the outcomes of qualitative research conducted in Turkey on respondents who married when they were children. It demonstrates that cultural factors played a certain role in these sorts of marriages. The snowball technique was applied to identify the interviewees, and thematic and content analysis were utilized to analyze the qualitative data. As a result of the research, four categories and ten themes correlated with child marriage were verified.