Child Marriage in Kyrgyzstan: Exploring Institutional Ambivalences in Constructing the “Victim” Available to Purchase

This chapter explores the institutional processes addressing child marriage in contemporary Kyrgyzstan with the focus on the operation of state-sponsored institutions of secondary education and their management strategies deployed when a child marriage comes under their purview. Drawing on 32 child marriage cases, the study documents contradictions between the recently emerging nationally recognized commitment to combatting violence against school children in Kyrgyzstan and the actual work done to protect schoolgirls from child marriage. Administrative practices used by educational managers construct married schoolgirls as “unfit for schooling” and act in accordance with these constructions. Using D. E. Smith’s feminist-inspired alternative sociology approach, institutional ethnography, as a conceptual framework, I argue that what happens is much more complex and nuanced than what is typically seen as a “mere” lack of acceptance, concealment, or acquiescence. My study describes, maps, and analyzes this institutional system to “reach beyond the locally observable and discoverable into the translocal social relations and organizations that permeate and control the local” (Smith, 2005, p. 65). Inquiring from the married girls’ standpoint, I discover that their exclusion is articulated by the state system of schools’ appraisal and monitoring, organized both politically and administratively as an extension of government and its efforts to reform the national comprehensive education system and ensure national security and peace. I discover that, in this system, the concept of “child bride” is treated with striking ambivalence in the institutional and public discourses, and the notion of “violence” is applied to child marriage in an inconsistent manner.