THE SCOURGE OF CHILD MARRIAGE : HOW 120 MILLION CHILDREN ARE POISED TO BECOME BRIDES IN THE NEXT DECADE

 

Many countries in the world have laws or customs that allow marriage at very young ages.  It has as much to do with tradition and controlling the female person, than with religion. 

The issue is that child brides face a lifetime of violence, abuse, and zero prospects to become independent, educated human beings.  

The excuse is that the girls' virginity is protected this way, but because the grooms do not wait until the girl is sexually mature and old enough to bear children, many of them face death during childbirth, and lifelong health problems. 

The issue is also that child brides are immediately taken away from society at large, and are in a way imprisoned into a lifestyle not of their choice, from which they cannot escape. 

In some cases, religion is cited as the reason to justify child brides.  But in all cases it is a practice purposely done to avoid empowerment of the female child, and the impossibility  of obtaining an education. In many other instances, the marriages are an excuse for parents to obtain money or even to settle a debt, but in so doing they also force their female child to a destiny they cannot reverse, since if the child bride were to flee the household where she found herself, she could not go home for protection, since the family of the child often does not have the money to repay the dowry.

In the case where the societal mores allow for multiples wives, the situation could become dire for the child bride since she would be little more than an indentured servant, forced from a tender age to do everything in the household once a more cherished bride arrives.

There is a worldwide campaign to outlaw the practice.  But in cases such as the far provinces of Pakistan, the laws that are in place are completely ignored by the uneducated tribes who live far and apart from the more modern society of the Pakistani mainland. 

This process repeats in many other parts of the world, in one guise or another, but with shatteringly similar results.  

Primary Source : Al Jazeera/ 6.16.13