Q+A: Why does child marriage happen?

04 Aug 2011 09:00

Source: trustlaw // Alex Whiting

A young Indian bride, Sheela, 8, sits besides her fourteen-year-old groom Daulat Ram (2nd L) during their marriage ceremony at Rajgarh district in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, May 4, 2003. REUTERS/Str JSG/DL

This story is part of a TrustLaw special report on child marriage

By Alex Whiting

LONDON (TrustLaw) – If a girl is married before the age of 18, her body may not be fully developed and her education will probably be cut short, child rights activists say. Chances are she will be wedded to a much older man and her negotiating skills will be limited.

As a result, she’s more likely to die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth, be beaten, raped or infected with HIV by her husband, abused by her in-laws and remain poor. Her children are more likely to die before the age of one, or grow up malnourished, poor and uneducated.

SO WHY DO PARENTS CHOOSE CHILD MARRIAGE?

The parents of child brides are often poor and use marriage as a way to provide for their daughter’s future, especially in areas where there are few economic opportunities for women.

Some families use marriage to build and strengthen alliances, to seal property deals, settle disputes or pay off debts.

In some cultures, child marriage is encouraged to increase the number of pregnancies and ensure enough children survive into adulthood to work on family land and support elderly relatives.

In South Asia, some families marry off all their daughters at the same time to reduce the cost of the wedding ceremony.

Chastity is another major reason, and many parents want to make sure their daughters do not have a child outside marriage.

There are many other cultural reasons for child marriage. In India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu, some communities have a strong social stigma against girls being married after puberty. Some people in Ethiopia’s Amhara region believe that menstruation is induced by intercourse.

Some also fear that if girls receive an education, they will be less willing to fulfil their traditional roles as wife and mother.

The number of child marriages often increases during conflicts or natural disasters, when families seek protection for their daughters or money for themselves.

CAN IT BE STOPPED?

Many experts working in this field say that child marriage can be reduced by improving girls’ access to education and paid work; improving their confidence; increasing their knowledge of how their bodies work; raising awareness among communities of the consequences of child marriage; and improving laws and enforcing them.

“What we’re finding now is that this combination of information works,” Anju Malhotra, an expert on child marriage and adolescent girls at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), said. “Girls do delay marriage. People’s attitudes do change.”

Here’s how some governments and non-governmental organisations have tackled the issue. These examples were gathered by ICRW:

Bangladesh: The average marriage age has risen since the government launched a secondary school programme in 1994 that pays parents compensation for the loss of their daughters’ domestic and agricultural labour. It also covers school fees and requires parents to sign a commitment not to marry off their daughters until they reach 18.

India: The average marriage age for girls rose from to 17 from 14.5 in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra state, just two years after girls were offered a life skills course. The course, run by the Institute for Health Management, Pachod, aims to improve girls’ confidence in influencing decisions about their own lives, including marriage.

Ethiopia: Early marriage committees in Amhara and Tigray regions intervene when they hear of parents wanting to marry off girls under the legal age of 18. The committees include government officials, women’s associations, religious leaders, teachers, parents and the girls themselves. The committees counsel parents and if necessary use legal action to stop marriages. In one year, 12,000 marriages were prevented.

India: The Supreme Court requires married couples to register their consent to be married and their age with local authorities, to better enforce the law establishing 18 as the minimum age of marriage. In the state of Uttar Pradesh, the government has launched a programme to increase awareness about the legal age of marriage, change values and attitudes about child marriage and deny eligibility for government jobs to people marrying before age 18.

SOURCES:

The Elders

Forum on Marriage and the Rights of Women and Girls

Global Coalition on Women and AIDS

International Center for Research on Women

International Planned Parenthood Federation

Plan UK

Population Council

UNFPA

UNICEF



CHILD MARRIAGE: Denying girls’ rights, perpetuating poverty

View the complete special report at childmarriage.trust.org

Videos:

Prologue
Sapna’s story, India
Farhiya’s story, Kenya
Fatou’s story, Senegal
Krishna and Kishan, India
Cherie Blair interview
Cassandra Balchin interview

Articles:

Child marriage a scourge for millions of girls
Child brides face 'silent health emergency'-experts
Child 'drought brides' sold secretly in Kenya
Teenage brides suffer pain and shame of fistula
India schoolgirl defies tradition to reject child marriage
From child bride to Senegal rights crusader

Resources:

Info-graphic
FACTBOX-Child marriage threatens girls' health and rights
Q+A: Why does child marriage happen?
Child marriage: further reading

Have Your Say:

Child marriage: Cultural right or global blight?


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Child marriage a scourge for millions of girls

04 Aug 2011 08:00

Source: trustlaw // Lisa Anderson

Fourteen-year-old child bride Lalita Saini (R) in Alsisar village, about 200 km (124 miles) north of Jaipur, India, April 25, 2007. REUTERS/Tanushree Punwani

This story is part of a TrustLaw special report on child marriage

* A child is married every three seconds

* Millions condemned to poverty and poor health

* Children of child brides also at risk

NEW YORK, Aug 4 (TrustLaw) - Child marriage, which steals the innocence of millions of girls worldwide and often condemns them to lives of poverty, ignorance and poor health, is one of the biggest obstacles to development, rights groups say.

A girl under the age of 18 is married every three seconds -- that's 10 million each year -- often without her consent and sometimes to a much older man, according to the children's charity Plan UK. Most of those marriages take place in Africa, the Middle East or South Asia.

"This is one of the biggest development issues of our time and we're committed to raising the voices of millions of girls married against their will," Plan UK head Marie Staunton said in her introduction to "Breaking Vows", a recent global report on child marriage.

From horrific childbirth injuries to the secret sale of "drought brides", the consequences of child marriage are explored in a multimedia documentary by TrustLaw, a legal news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation (http://childmarriage.trust.org).

"Young children have babies -- your life is ruined, your education is ruined," said Kanta Devi, who was 16 when she married in Badakakahera village in India's Rajasthan state.

"You become upset with everything in your life," she told TrustLaw.

The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child considers marriage before the age of 18 a human rights violation.

But according to the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), there are more than 50 million child brides worldwide, a number that is expected to grow to 100 million over the next decade.

RIPPLE EFFECT

Rights activists say six of the eight U.N. Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015 are directly affected by the prevalence of child marriage -- the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger; achievement of universal primary education; promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women; reduction in child mortality; improvement in maternal health; and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.

The ripple effect is devastating, experts say.

Girls forced into early marriage rarely continue their education, denying them any hope of independence, the ability to earn a livelihood or of making an economic contribution to their households.

The practice also reinforces the concept of girls as worthless burdens on their families to be jettisoned as soon as possible.

Girls who complete secondary school are six times less likely to become child brides than contemporaries with less or no education, according to the ICRW, a Washington-based think tank.

But distance from schools and a lack of school fees often preclude education for the poorest girls, who are twice as likely to marry young as those from wealthier homes.

In Niger, Chad and Mali, more than 70 percent of girls are married before the age of 18, according to ICRW analysis of demographic and health data last year.

Bangladesh, Guinea, Central African Republic, Mozambique, Burkina Faso and Nepal have child marriage rates over 50 percent, the data showed.

Ethiopia, Malawi, Madagascar, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Eritrea, Uganda, India, Nicaragua, Zambia and Tanzania are all above 40 percent.

The reasons child marriages occur vary with the country and are rarely simple.

"Very often people are sort of quick to demonise, in some ways, the family members and the people who make the decisions about the marriage of girls," Jeffrey Edmeades, a social demographer with ICRW, told TrustLaw.

"But we're finding, for the most part, that people are making these decisions because they feel it's best for their daughters. Parents love their children and they do want the best for them. They're just not sure what the best is."

Edmeades, who has been working with aid agency CARE on a project to tackle child marriage in Ethiopia, gave the example of children in that country being betrothed before birth to cement strategic alliances between families.

In other cases, girls are married off early to ensure that their virginity, and thus their economic value as brides, is intact and the honour of the family is protected.

Meanwhile, debts and natural disasters, such as tsunamis and drought, can lead to girls being sold off as brides as families scramble for survival.

'SILENT HEALTH EMERGENCY'

Girls under 15, their bodies still developing and their pelvises narrow, are five times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than women over 20, the U.S. Agency for International Development estimates.

The vast majority of those deaths are in the developing world, where a lack of pre- and post-natal care and advanced procedures such as Caesarean sections makes pregnancy and childbirth far more risky than in rich countries. In Africa, for example, 60 percent of women and girls give birth without a skilled medical professional present, according to the U.N. World Population Fund.

Worldwide, 70,000 girls aged 15-19 die each year during pregnancy or childbirth, UNICEF says. The U.N. World Population Fund considers pregnancy the leading cause of death in that age group, citing complications of childbirth and unsafe abortions as major factors.

Children of child brides are also at risk. Babies born to mothers younger than 18 are more likely to be underweight or stillborn, Plan UK says.

Girls forced into early marriage are also at an increased risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS because they are unlikely to be able to negotiate safe sex with their husbands.

"Child marriage is a silent health emergency in the sense that it's often overlooked as a root cause of maternal mortality and morbidity (illness)," the ICRW's Edmeades said.

DRAWING MORE ATTENTION

While it is a subject still little known and rarely discussed in much of the Western world, the issue of child marriage is drawing greater attention from international aid and humanitarian organisations, as well as governments.

In the United States, where child marriage is rare, the U.S. Senate has reintroduced legislation aimed at curbing global child marriage that was unanimously passed in the Senate in 2010 but blocked in the House of Representatives.

The International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act would establish a strategy over several years to prevent child marriage in developing countries.

It would also require the State Department to report on child marriage in its annual human rights report and integrate efforts to prevent the practice into current development programmes.

The bill will be reintroduced in the House this autumn, according to Betty McCollum, a Democrat representative from Minnesota, who is its lead sponsor there.

It was blocked in the House last December primarily due to Republican concerns that it would help organisations supplying abortions, which "couldn't have been farther from the truth", McCollum told TrustLaw.

"It has nothing to do with abortion," she said. "It has everything to do with saving 12-year-old girls from being sold into slavery or sold to settle a family debt."

Not only will it make aid dollars more effective, she added, but "it's a win for the child, it's a win for the community the child lives in and it's a win for the international community".

The Elders, an influential group of global leaders founded in 2007 by former South African President Nelson Mandela, gathered dozens of organisations for a two-day meeting in Ethiopia in June and have launched a campaign called "Girls Not Brides: the Global Partnership to End Child Marriage".

(For more on child marriage, including info-graphics, videos, stories and blogs, visit http://childmarriage.trust.org)

(TrustLaw is a global news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation, covering women's legal rights, good governance and pro bono law. Visit www.trust.org/trustlaw)

(Reporting by Lisa Anderson; editing by Tim Large and Sonya Hepinstall)



CHILD MARRIAGE: Denying girls’ rights, perpetuating poverty

View the complete special report at childmarriage.trust.org

Videos:

Prologue
Sapna’s story, India
Farhiya’s story, Kenya
Fatou’s story, Senegal
Krishna and Kishan, India
Cherie Blair interview
Cassandra Balchin interview

Articles:

Child marriage a scourge for millions of girls
Child brides face 'silent health emergency'-experts
Child 'drought brides' sold secretly in Kenya
Teenage brides suffer pain and shame of fistula
India schoolgirl defies tradition to reject child marriage
From child bride to Senegal rights crusader

Resources:

Info-graphic
FACTBOX-Child marriage threatens girls' health and rights
Q+A: Why does child marriage happen?
Child marriage: further reading

Have Your Say:

Child marriage: Cultural right or global blight?