Another group of respondents indicated that they were living comfortably since their husbands were gainfully employed in the formal and informal sector. One said her husband was a builder and she was previously a house maid, whilst another was a tailor who made seat covers and many other “fancy” crafts which she made for people who placed orders with her. She said she made seat quality covers which her customers would take for resale in South Africa. Some respondents said they practiced poultry but reported that business was very poor in Goromonzi. Despite the poor business, they felt life was a bit better in Goromonzi as they could afford to pay only $30 rent per month as compared to Harare where they used to pay $100 per month. Paradoxically, other respondents said they could afford to pay $100 when they were staying in Harare but they could not afford the same $30 per month in Goromonzi because of the economic challenges they were facing. This paradox will need to be looked at more deeply in future research on livelihoods for child brides. 6. Self-Efficacy Self-efficacy is a crucial aspect of human functioning (Bandura. 2002), and, for the purposes of this study, we were only interested in two of the three forms of self-efficacy: direct personal agency, and proxy agency, agency that relies on other’s acts in order to achieve one’s own desired outcome. We ignored collective agency, ways in which groups work to determine their future, since our study was looking mainly at individuals. Both of the other forms of self-efficacy are obviously important in a marital relationship, and both forms develop through childhood and adolescence, and can be facilitated or impeded by one’s upbringing and experience. It seems evident that early marriage may have deleterious effects on the development of selfefficacy, and one of the most deleterious effects would seem to be early marriage preceded by rape. Here, one of the themes that ran through the respondents’ submissions was that when a girl was raped, society was angry with her, believed that she had seduced the culprit and frequently, she was chased away and forced to live with the rapist. It was believed that most people thought that girls/women who get raped were prostitutes, and, thus, the society’s sympathies lay with the “aggrieved rapist” and less with the “guilty victim”. As highlighted earlier, the families were quite keen to avoid the legal route when addressing rape cases and other cases of older men having supposedly consensual sex with under-age girls precisely because they apportioned a huge portion of the blame on the girls. Several respondents indicated that the child brides were getting into the marriages against their wishes but they were often powerless to change the course of events once the family knew of the rape issue or of the sexual relation between the girl and the boy/man. Younger respondents were unanimous in their view that, if given a choice between staying at home and living with the rapist, girls would rather remain single. It was interesting to note that older respondents accused young girls of making false rape reports when they were willing partners of the sexual relations. In the same breath, the young girls accused parents and guardians of working in cahoots with older men such as businessmen and elders in the Johanne Marange church in pushing young girls into forced marriages. Child brides reported that child marriage signaled the end of their formal education and effectively sealed their fate as slaves working for the older men’s households. A girl was caught by her family while having sexual intercourse with a boy who then ran away. Her family beat her up and took her to the boy’s house and told him that they had brought this 23