Child-led Marriage in Thailand’s Deep South

Abstract Interventions to end child marriage tend to rely on a monolithic representation of girls as victims have stereotyped it as a marriage between a young girl and an older man. Shifting this lens to the idea that children are not powerless in decision-making, this paper aims to unpack how the practitioners exercise agency in marriage, and explore the child marriage trends in 1990 to 2020 in the Malay-Muslim community in Thailand. The findings showed that the child marriage rate has declined and since 2006 most of the women who married under 15, married men whose age difference was between 0–4 years. Interview results based on the fieldwork in 2019 and 2022 underlined that social media changed the norms around marriage, which influenced some youths to decide to marry and divorce early. This paper aims to study child marriage as a today’s practice, not as the result of traditions.