Feminine Representation and Social Death in Child Marriage Humanitarian Discourse: A Gender-Based Social Actor Analysis

Child marriage is considered by United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to be a form of modern slavery. Thus, studying how victims of child marriage are represented in UNICEF discourse is crucial for uncovering to what extent it succeeds in achieving its aims, reflecting reality, and highlighting the causes of such phenomenon. This gender-based analysis study uses Critical Discourse Analysis and Van Leeuwen’s (2008) social actor representation framework to analyze the social actor strategies employed by UNICEF in its 2021 child marriage report. Králová’s (2015) conceptual framework of social death is also used to show how modern slavery victims are represented as socially dead. The analysis concludes that UNICEF discourse excludes the masculine social actors who are in charge of marrying young girls off. Instead, it activates the feminine identities; hence, focusing only on the victims while neglecting the social actors responsible for the practice of child marriage. Moreover, the activation strategies identified support the view that victims of child marriage are represented as socially dead.