For the lecture, I was asked to talk about my research on child marriage in Indonesia. Recounting the stories of the people I talked to during my fieldwork in Indonesia for this occasion, and discussing with the lecture participants, gave me a fresh look at their stories and the questions of choice once again.
One of such stories is the story of a girl who married at the age of 16, lived in a rural village in Bali. She became pregnant when she was 15 years old, and had a customary marriage before giving birth. At that time she has been in courtship for over a year, with her boyfriend who was 6 years older than her. When her boyfriend asked to have sex with her as ‘a proof of love’, she agreed, although she was ‘a bit scared’. When she found out that she was pregnant, her pregnancy was three-month-long. When her boyfriend came to know about her pregnancy, he first denied that it was his child and he refused to marry her. After a week, he eventually agreed to marry because he was ‘ashamed’ as ‘everybody knew’ about their relationship in the small village they resided. The news about her pregnancy upset her parents. Her mother said to her, ‘Have abortion because you two are still young’. She wanted her to continue studying and it was not possible to do so while being pregnant. The girl, on the other hand, decided not to have abortion because she was ‘scared’. At the time of the interview, she was already in her 30s, and her daughter was a teenager. She already has divorced her husband after ten years of their marriage. She said she does not regret having a child, but she regret marrying him. ‘If I can go back to the time when I became pregnant, I would choose to be a single mother’. However at that time, it was not the option. People in the village did not accept a single mother – if she gave birth without getting married, she and her family would have been ostracized from their local community.
She married because she became pregnant – not because she wanted to have a child at that age, but because of the lack of knowledge about reproductive health. In Indonesia, because of the influence of Islamic norm, pre-marital sexual intercourse is considered a sin and therefore a social taboo – there is a desperate lack of reproductive health education, and sufficient and correct information about contraceptive means and consequences of sexual intercourse. Moreover, abortion is illegal – many people resort to illegal abortion but it is often unsafe. On top of that, being a single mother was also not an option – because of the taboo around pre-marital sex, pregnancy and giving birth outside of wedlock is severely stigmatized and has heavy consequences on the mother’s social and communal life, as well as her family’s. The girl in this story gave birth and married the boy despite her parents’ disagreement. It suggests that it was ‘her decision’, the exercise of her strong agency. But her decision was constrained by social norms around her. Her decision was motivated by fear – as her words ‘I was scared’ clearly indicate. Then, was her decision to marry, ‘her choice’?
It reminded me of the book ‘On Freedom’ by Maggie Nelson that I am reading. In one of the chapters where she discusses sexual violence and freedom, she writes,
Analyzing the power dynamics of any particular scenario can be crucial to our understanding what happened and why, but it does not follow that if elements of power exist our agency is extinguished. The exercise of agency is always a negotiation of available possibilities and pressures (p.110).
Perhaps I could think of her story along the line by replacing ‘power’ with ‘constraint’ or ‘social pressure’. The situation she faced came with a number of constraints, resulting from the limited options for abortion, lack of knowledge and access to information, social pressure and strong consequences attached to it. Awareness of such factors is crucial to understanding why she decided to marry and give birth. But it does not follow that if these factors exist her agency is extinguished. The exercise of agency is a negotiation of available possibilities and pressures.
But again, was it ‘her choice’? If freedom is ‘a matter of making space, of increasing degrees of possibility and decreasing degrees of domination’ (I replace domination with constraints here) and does not mean all constraints and relational concerns have vacated the field, with what amount of constraints and pressures do we become ‘unfree’? How can we possibly quantify or identify the line? Is it important to identify the line? Why?
Is it important to identify if it was ‘her choice’?
Inquiries continue …
Hoko Horii 