H. Horii, Child Marriage, Rights and Choice: Rethinking Agency in International Human Rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When traveling for fieldwork in Rwanda earlier this year, I met a child protection officer who works on child marriage programmes for a European ngo.I enthusiastically brought up that I was reading, Child Marriage, Rights and Choice: Rethinking Agency in International Human Rights, by Hoko Horii.The book explores the socio-legal practice of child marriage in Bali, Indonesia, focusing primarily on cases of underage couples who marry because of outof-wedlock pregnancy.My interlocutor was quick to jump in and stated that is not what they -the ngo -understand as "child marriage".When they are talking about child marriage, she made clear, they talk about young girls being forced to marry much older men.One of the book's main critiques, I explained, is that this type of essentialising obscures the diverse reasons why children marry, what such a marriage looks like and the implications thereof on the individuals and the community involved.It furthermore questions why, if we encourage girls to use their agency to "say no to child marriage", do we seem to ignore or disregard their agency to want to marry?"So, we should just let them get married if they say they want to?" Her question goes straight to the heart of the book, and to one of the main challenges of children's rights studies more broadly: How to walk the thin line between children's protection and agency?I joked that I would let her know once I finished reading it.Having done so, I can now tell her that Horii provides no easy answers to the questions of how child marriage should be defined and if we should allow girls to get married, if they say they want to.Instead, Horii argues that these normative questions are, from a local perspective, perhaps best left unanswered, and that a general ban on child marriage might not be effective in supporting efforts to end this practice.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".