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| Image from Pixabay (c) Thacreations |
She’s barely ten, the little girl. Her
hands can’t quite hold the whole bar of soap in them – they’re still the hands
of a little child. She lifts an infant off her lap, just as she has finished
giving him a bath. She dabs at him with a towel, watching the little baby
grinning at her. A wave of fatigue washes over her, and she just wants to give
up and go to sleep. The girl has a perennial ache in her stomach, she always
feels drained and tired. She is always in too much pain, and she wishes sometimes
she never had to bear a son. She wishes silently that her little son
understands. She loves him, of course, like any mother would love her son. But
to rudely be forced to deal with motherhood at a time when she would still be
dependent on her own mother – is something else altogether.
This little girl is just 10.
When her counterparts across the world are
playing House with a doll in tow, she
is actually keeping house with a real child in tow.
Girls like this little one number more than
your fingers can count. Married off at an age that pre-dates puberty or follows
closely at the heels of puberty, these girls may be fertile, but are physically
and medically incapable of delivering a child until their bodies are mature
enough – which typically happens only after a minimum of three years after
menarche. Child marriage is not only the erosion of innocence and a potentially
successful future – but also has a rather disparaging effect on the physical
strength, health and development of the girls themselves. Quite often, in child
marriages, the “groom” is an older person, sometimes, by many decades. On an annual basis, as many as ten million
girls are removed from school and forced into marriages they do not choose to
be a part of. And these girls are young – nine, ten, eleven. Their childhoods
are long dead, as these girls become mothers while they themselves desperately
need theirs around to grow up.
Girls are sacrificed
to preserve “familial honour”, being given away in order to settle a dispute
between two feuding families. If they question the marriage they are forced
into, or if they try avoiding it, the name of honour is invoked to silence
them. Their “conduct” in choosing a man to marry, or refusing to marry someone,
or even in being raped – is believed to be detrimental to the honour of the
families.
Putting an end to
child marriage is not something that only the law can do. What we need is a
shift in mindsets, a change in the mentality that prevails surrounding the
issue. The empowerment of a girl is the empowerment of
her family, and the empowerment of her future. A girl child subject to
discrimination grows to be a woman abused. And that trend needs to be nipped in
the bud.