Children as Victims of Forced Marriages in Lesotho: A Question of Cultural Practice or Approval of Child Exploitation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study focuses on the experiences of children as victims of abduction into forced child marriage in Lesotho. The study pays attention to children living in the rural area of Semonkong, where patterns of abduction into forced marriage are common. The objectives were, to explore factors that contribute to incidents of a child forced marriages, to determine the effects of a child forced into marriages. The study used a qualitative research method. A sample of 10 participants (all women aged 21-51) from the Semonkong area in Lesotho were sampled using Snowball sampling. In-depth interviews were used to collect data and were analyzed thematically. The findings: families use cultural practice as a means to exact power and authority to exploit children to escape poverty. Most girls were abducted without their consent, threatened, and were continuously violated in their marriages. They experienced damaging and degrading psychological effects from abduction but more so in their marriages. They endure all sorts of abuse and never reported the incident to the police. Recommendations: Preventing forced child marriage requires strengthened legal and policy frameworks, to ensure increased awareness and greater enforcement of existing laws.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".