I wanted to be a bride, not a wife

Accounts of child marriage in the Bedouin community in Israel

Bibliographic Data

ID2395527
AuthorsIris Manor Binyamini (0000-0001-5601-942X, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, corresponding author), A Shoshana (0000-0002-9902-5384, University of Haifa)
Year2023
Volume60
Issue2
Pages357-367
Publication date2023-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTranscultural Psychiatric Research Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0041-1108 • E-ISSN: 0315-4386
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/13634615221135936
PMID36384329
OpenAlexW4309244974
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited34

This article presents a qualitative study of the experience of child marriage among Bedouin in Israel. We conducted semi-structured interviews with a convenience sample of 17 young Bedouin women, aged 17-21, who were married between the ages of 12-17. The interviewees' descriptions indicate that child marriage is a powerful cultural practice that has evolved into a 'natural' and 'obvious' tool for supervising girls and women. All the interviewees reported domestic violence, despair, and reported suicide attempts as a response to their existential suffering in their marriage and as an act of daily resistance to a powerful and oppressive cultural practice. These findings raise challenges in the case of global mental health interventions since these interventions not only require cultural sensitivity to avoid the constraint of Western psychiatric diagnoses and classifications, but also more critical thinking about the interactions between global and local, universalist and culturalist perspectives

Domestic violence · Mental health · Poison control · Political science · Psychiatry · Psychological intervention · Sociology · Suicide prevention · Wife · Community Health and Development · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Medicine · Migration, Health and Trauma · Psychology

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