Document Type : Research Paper

Author

• Agnes Phoebe Muyanga

University of Kansas

Abstract

Performative care for victims of gender-based violence in Tanzania through established socio-cultural gendered policies that reinforce the disproportionate care labor that women activists carry. Women's rights activists historically sustain the care labor of protecting young girls from various forms of abuse and violence, in Tanzania, this abuse is embedded within Tanzania's constitution under the Law on Marriage Act of 1971, sections 13 and 17 that upholds the age of consent for Tanzanian girls at fourteen years or fifteen years respectively. In this chapter, I address the cost of harmful cultural or religious practices that sustain and reinforce violence against young girls in Tanzania. I explore the challenges of navigation justice in systemic heteropatriarchal societies and the exhausting but rewarding care burden of protecting young girls by women's rights activist groups or legal civil society organizations. My work adds to the voices of activists, scholars, victims, and survivors to explicitly emphasize the dangers that young girls face in societies that see children as objects for masculine domination and pleasure.

Keywords

• Care-work, Young-mothers, Tanzania'
• s Constitution, Africa, Gender Based Violence, Women'
• s Rights

Main Subjects

• epistemology