Whilst browsing through my Facebook feed a few days ago, I came across a Youtube video titled “12-year-old Thea’s wedding to 37-year-old Geir” . This video documented Norway’s first official child wedding on the UN’s International Day of the Girl Child. I later learned that this is an anti child-marriage campaign by Plan, an international organization that focuses on women rights, specifically child marriages. This campaign all started when Thea’s (whose real name is Maja Bergström) wedding blog, which was set up as part of the campaign, went viral online. In her wedding blog, Thea writes about many things, from tasting cakes and picking flowers for her wedding, trying on wedding dresses, to her fear of having sex for the first time.
Child marriage has been (and still is) a prominent social issue in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa for a long time, and there are numerous women’s rights campaign from all over the world that aim to raise awareness of this issue. However, I feel that some of these campaigns are often overlooked by the public. This video made me question that what is it that makes this particular campaign more effective and powerful than other anti-child marriage campaigns.
In her blog post, ‘Eboliographies’, Angel Wen, who is in my ASTU class, uses the Ebola case in the US as an example to illustrate that people often neglect and dismiss important issues happening in other places in the world, unless these issues are directly affecting them. I feel that perhaps one of the reasons why this particular campaign has gained so much attention is due to the fact that Thea’s blog is written from a westerner perspective and that this incident happened in the West. Plan Norway has shed light on this issue in a Western context to attract readership, which are mostly western readers.
In Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith argue that many NGOs and activists would purposely ‘package’ (14) stories from victims in order to attract western readers, in the hopes that they would “identity with, contribute to and become advocates” for their campaigns (14). In her blog, Thea writes about the preparation for her wedding in a western perceptive. It is clear that cake tasting and wedding dress fitting don’t usually happen in ‘real’ child-marriage cases in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. I found it interesting that Plan chose to purposely set up a fake blog instead of using real child bride stories to raise awareness of this issue. Does this mean that western perspectives and experiences are more powerful and provocative in gaining response than ‘real’ child bride stories? Perhaps putting these issues in a Western context do make it easier for western audience to connect and identify with the cause more effectively.
Needless to say, Plan Norway’s anti child marriage campaign was a huge success. Thea’s wedding blog became Norway’s most read blog during the course of one day. On her wedding day, several hundred people gathered outside the church and around 400 people were inside the church protested against child marriage. This campaign has also reached out to more 3.5 million people via Facebook and Twitter (Plan Norge).
More information:
“12-year-old Thea’s wedding to 37-year-old Geir” Youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrPkpa-NL1I
Thea’s (Maja Bergström) wedding blog (in Norwegian):
A (close enough) translation of the blog through Google Translate:
More about Plan Norway (the international organization which started the campaign):
https://www.plan-norge.no/english
http://plan-international.org/girls/child-marriage.php?lang=en
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Work cited:
‘Plan Norge’. Plan Norge, n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. ‘Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights’. Biography 27.1 (2004): 1-23
Wen, Angel. ‘Eboliographies’. The Chameleon. UBC Blogs. WordPress. 22 Oct. 2014. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
Image: http://cdn29.elitedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/524.jpg
