Daily Times

On October 11, which has been designated ‘International Day of the Girl’, I was E-Mailed by Human Rights Watch (HRW)to tell Florida lawmakers through E-Mail to support the bill introduced in Florida’s state legislature to end child marriage in the state. I got immensely shocked and astonished after I found out that in Florida, children can legally marry and there is no minimum age for when children can get married or consent to sex.

From 2001 to 2015, over 16,000 children under the age of 18 were married in Florida with the full support of the law. This is the second highest rate in the USA for that period.  This February, The State of New York raised the legal age of marriage from 14 to 17 years.HRW further informed that globally, 15 million girls marry before reaching the age of 18 every year. If the trend of child marriage continues with the same pace, by 2050 there will be 1.2 billion women alive who married as children. However, child marriage has devastating consequences; including higher drop-out rates from schools, escalating rates of poverty, domestic violence, mental and physical health disorders and deaths as a result of early pregnancy.

With trivial variation, the same situation of marrying children prevails in Pakistan. Though under Section 2 of the Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929 the legal age to marry is 16 years for girls 18 and for boys, the tradition of child marriages continues to exist unabatedly. According to some estimates, 30 percent of the marriages in the country are child marriages, some of which involve girls as young as nine or ten years. Some days back, The Child Marriage Restraint (Amendment) bill was moved by Senator Sehar Kamran to increase the minimum age for marriage of girls from 16 to 18 years but shockingly, a majority of the lawmakers rejected it in the Senate, citing it as against Islamic injunctions.

The shocking fact is that rural Pakistan’s patriarchal society considers daughters and sisters an economic deadweight on families

Like some other parts of the world, in rural Pakistan girls are considered a commodity to be bought, sold and traded. As they reach puberty they are forced into marriages and are expected to start bearing children and begin a life-long enslavement that prevents them from realizing their full potential as adults and from contributing to the economic and social progress of their communities and nation. However, this is stark reality that without contributions of women in these fields, Sustainable Development Goals set under the UN agenda 2030 can never be achieved. The UNFPA report reveals that 10 is a pivotal age for girls and 35 percent of the total population of Pakistan is between the ages of 10 and 14 and two million of them are 10 year old girls only. According to Dr Hassan Mohtashami, the country director of the UNFPA, if Pakistan starts focusing and investing in these 10 year old girls today, they can prove to be a beneficial part of the society in the future.

The heinous tradition of child marriage is a sheer violation of human rights that deprives girls of their fundamental right of choosing husbands of their own choice. Despite widespread condemnation due to its harmful impacts, the practice of child marriage, which is incongruent with common sense and pragmatism, is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the lower and lower middle classes in rural Pakistan, where parents select spouses of their children especially of their girls. They believe it is a girl’s duty to accept decisions made about their marriages. Mostly girls are married in the same caste and community. However, as children of the middle and high class families are educated, well-informed of their rights and grown up in a free society they select their own life partners themselves or parents get them married with their consent.

The shocking fact is that rural Pakistan’s patriarchal society considers daughters and sisters an economic deadweight on families. In this society, the practice of giving young girls in marriage to a victim’s family to settle dispute between families exists. These girls live dejected live as their in-laws treat them as slaves. The existence of this inhuman custom can hardly be found anywhere else in the world.

In reality, child brides are neither physically or emotionally capable of being wives or mothers. They often experience dangerous complications during pregnancy and childbirth as the developing bodies of teenage girls are not thoroughly ready to endure the difficulties of pregnancy and childbirth. Many of these child brides get infected with HIV because their husbands have remained sexually active before marriage. Alarmingly, a high stillbirth rate of 40.7 deaths per 1000 live births and around 15,000 maternal deaths have also been reported to occur in Pakistan annually. Early marriage thwarts the personal development and growth of child brides as they constantly endure physical, mental and emotional changes before reaching adulthood.

In Pakistan, the conventional behaviour and traditional attitudes of male members towards their women especially in the lower and lower middle class families and cultural norms prevailing in these families are, amidst other factors, the significant factors,  for the existence and development of child marriage tradition in the country. The only way to protect lives and future of thousands of girls in Pakistan from the menace of child marriage is a change in behaviours and attitudes. To achieve this objective; scholars, educationists and human right activists should come forward and play constructive role. Finally, child marriage should be considered as bad as rape in the eyes of the law.

The writer is an academic, and can be reached on Twitter @ARShykh

Published in Daily Times, October 26^th 2017.