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A 16 year
old girl recounts that her parents bartered her into a marriage when she was 15.
Her dreams of completing her education by going to college and to provide a better
life for her family were shattered. She implored her family not to marry her off but it fell on deaf ears.
Komal,
from India is now a mother of a child in a marriage she did not want. Since she
became pregnant, she has hardly been allowed to step out of the house.
She was
blamed and scoffed for not producing a son by her husband and in laws and she
said sometimes, when the others are not at home, she would read her old school
books and hold her baby daughter and cry.
Many
girls from India share the same fate of Komal, specifically in poor, remote
communities across India.
Child
marriage, like the caste system, dowry system and female infanticide and
foeticide is illegal in India, punishable by long jail terms and hefty fines to
the perpetrators, yet child marriages continue to happen till this date.
Child marriage is not exclusive to India -- every year, throughout the world, millions of
young girls are forced into marriage in developing and poor countries like
Yemen, Pakistan, Niger, Chad, Mali, Guinea and South Asian, West African and
sub-Saharan African countries.
Like India, child marriage is outlawed in many
countries and international agreements forbid the practice yet this tradition
is still rampant, especially in 3rd world nations.
In some countries, girls are used as
bargaining chips to strengthen alliances, pay family debts, leading to child
marriages. Families may want to divest themselves of the burden of having
a girls. In extreme cases, they may want to earn
money by selling the girl.
This could stem from poverty, pressures
from their communities, partners and even their own families.
Almost all marriages in India are arranged marriages -- rather than an union of two foolish young man and woman besotted with each other, Indian marriages are the union of two families and caste and social status play active roles in the commencing of arranged marriages.
In India, child marriages are conducted at night, in secrecy and it is very difficult to detect. If police do make arrests and stop a child marriage from happening, the bride to be will be spurned by any suitor and her family will be disgraced for life, perhaps for generations to come. It is a stigma intertwined in Indian culture spanning centuries and to change such ingrained establishments overnight is not possible even by the force of law and order. It is, indeed, extraordinarily complicated.
For almost all girls, child marriage means goodbye school and hello motherhood way too early. Girls as young as 13 become mothers to babies fathered by their husbands who are years older than them (some, old enough to become their grandfathers) when they themselves are babies. Pregnancy and childbirth take a toll on the girls' health.
The pregnant teens don't only lack proper nutrition or health
care, girls who are pregnant at age 15 or younger are also at higher risk
for eclampsia (seizures), anemia, postpartum hemorrhage and puerperal
endometritis (uterine infection).
Girls who are not fully physically
developed are at risk for prolonged labor, which could result in obstetric
fistula. This condition, marked by a hole in the birth canal, usually results
in the death of the baby and makes the mother incontinent.
The girls have their education, childhood, adolescence, freedom, innocence, health and basically their own convictions and desires stolen by the very people who should nurture them, i.e their parents, relatives and community.
The families don't realize that by curtailing the education of girls by marrying them off before they are 18, they are only perpetuating the cycle of poverty.
When asked why the girls are either not sent to school or made to quit school halfway, the answer was there were no female teachers there.
When girls are not educated, they can't get into life changing professions like educators or at least be an educated mother whose top priority would be educating her children, especially her daughters. And, it's a vicious cycle.
Still, families in India especially in Northern India do this for a number of reasons -- perhaps they can't afford to feed the rest of their children and paradoxically because they love their daughters and have their best interests in their hearts but not necessarily the best for the girls, given the typical western ideals.
Many girls from poor families in villages are sent to work instead of school. These young girls work in the fields under punishing circumstances, in sweltering or wet weather and suffer the possible consequences of young men having sex with them before they are married, which, in that culture renders her, basically an outcast for the rest of her life.
For some parents, they vindicate that they are protecting their daughters from possible rape because they live in a society where the loss of the virginity of a young woman out of wedlock, renders her an outcast.
In the abstract, the government people of India has stressed that education is important. But, it becomes kinda irrelevant when you live in a remote village and the only school there only offers education up to 5th grade. If a girl is to further her education, she has to step out from her village to go to school or college in the city and long bus rides and walking distances are required, With predatory men on the bus and lurking on roads makes the venturing out of the village itself dangerous. The prime example for this is the med student who was gang raped in a moving bus in Delhi in December 2013.
Faced with the status quo above, you don't send your daughters to school no matter how much a government personnel tells on how important schooling is.
So you have no cultural option, no effective schooling system past 5th grade, no tradition in regard of individual rights per-se, where you can choose who to marry and more importantly when you want to get married, girls are either married off early or 'booked' in a ceremonial wedding proceedings so that the girls would have a sense of belonging and don't go astray.
Since the intended girls' future is already a foregone conclusion, the intended boys are free to acquire a formal education, even abroad, while their 'wives' receive an 'education' at home on how to do household chores and how to serve their husbands.
Society needs to change, caging patriarchal establishments should be crumbled by education, effective schooling system should be phased in and girls education should be given top priority.
Women are an asset to a country, not a liability and when I say asset, I don't mean their bodies -- I mean their brains, capacity and capability.
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