Sociological Analysis of the Role of Poverty in the Child Marriage Experience (Case: Women in the City of Chabahar)

Marriage of young girls during childhood is a social issue which has affected the lives of women and young girls in different parts of the world. The aim of this research is to discover the interpretations and rationales of the women in the city of Chabahar regarding their experience of child marriage through a qualitative methodology and Grounded Theory approach. To this end, using a theoretical sampling method, 28 young girls in Chabahar County were chosen and deep and semi-structured interviews were carried out with them. The categories that provided the causal conditions for the marriage of young girls during childhood years were financial poverty, cultural/educational poverty, unfavorable family circumstances, and gender discrimination. In addition, interventional conditions (poverty of female heads of household, and the femininity of poverty) and contextual conditions (urban poverty, unfriendly living environments, and normalized patriarchy) have become a background for and facilitated the marriage of young girls. Moreover, data analysis using open, axial, and selective coding showed that the central category abstracted from the marriage of young girls in the sample is “extreme poverty, and multifaceted child marriage”. The findings implied that child marriages expose young girls to different kinds of obvious and indirect distressful situations, including child motherhood, child widowhood, domestic violence, dropping out of school, reinforcement of the cycle of poverty, severe depression, and social isolation.