Making Responsibility Visible, Leaving Authority Opaque: Gendered Subject Positions In Documentary Accounts Of Community Child Marriage Advocacy In South Sumatra

Abstrak

Community advocacy against child marriage does more than communicate risk or link residents to services. It also makes social positions recognisable and distributes preventive work. This secondary qualitative analysis examines nine adult interview documents associated with Women’s Crisis Center Palembang in South Sumatra, Indonesia. Because the analysis was restricted to the approved adult corpus, girlhood is examined through adult- and programme-mediated representations. A critical interpretivist single-case design combined framework analysis with scholarship on subject formation, recognition, responsibilisation, gendered community labour, and participation. The records depict recurring dialogue, accompaniment, women’s cadres, material activities, referral, and institutional relationships. They offer three interconnected subject positions: the future-oriented girl, the preventive female caregiver, and the relational woman intermediary. These positions articulate education, employment, preparation, and delayed marriage as legitimate futures, while making women’s local knowledge and community proximity organisationally useful. Yet the records document preventive labour and recognition much more clearly than resource control, agenda-setting, household decision authority, or enforceable institutional obligations. The article proposes responsibility-authority asymmetry as a diagnostic concept for this uneven evidentiary visibility. It does not establish that authority was absent or unchanged in practice. The corpus supports reported changes in understanding, caregiving orientation, and future planning, but not behavioural change, reduced child-marriage incidence, programme effectiveness, or causal impact. The contribution is to connect social-identity formation with the allocation of preventive labour while specifying the evidentiary limits of claims about power.