Girl children should be studying not delivering babies!

“Amma, I’m sleepy and I want to go to sleep,” cries a 12-year-old girl but she is being led to her husband’s bedroom. Without knowing what her ‘husband’ is doing to her, she moans in pain. This is not a scene in a child porn film, it’s a grim picture that thousands of poverty-stricken villages paint.

Marriage before 18 years of age is a blatant violation of human rights. No one has the right to limit the child from interacting with friends and relatives, nor to deny her right to education.
Despite having all those awareness campaigns and welfare programmes, girl children often end up doing bonded labour, enslavement, commercial sexual exploitation and violence, all due to child marriage. They are exposed to serious health risks, early pregnancy, and various STDs especially HIV/AIDS.

Reasons for these inhuman practices are many. Financial difficulties, ignorance, eagerness to get male protection to their daughters or oppressive traditional norms and values are the reasons why girls are married off at a tender age.

More than one third of the women between the ages 20-24 were married across the globe before they reached the age of 18. Approximately 14 million adolescent girls between the ages 15-19 give birth each year. Girls in this age group are twice more likely to die during child birth than women in their twenties. Rate of child marriage are higher in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Let me produce a statistics excerpted from elsewhere: According to the 2001 census there are 1.5 million girls, in India, under the age of 15 already married. Of these, 20% or approximately 300,000 are mothers to at least one child.   The 2001 census also estimated the average age of marriage has risen to 18.3 for females. The male average is 22.6 years. But child marriage is still widespread across the nation. States like Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Andra Pradesh still have average age of marriage below the legal age of eighteen for females.

Let’s do our bit to prevent child marriages, at least by way of talking loudly about it. Early pregnancies are complicated. Adolescent mothers give birth prematurely or to low weight babies. The health of the child and mother are at risk and often they do not survive. Child marriage also makes girls more vulnerable to domestic violence, sexual abuse and inability to complete primary education. It is also found that infant mortality rates are higher than the national average in the states where child marriage is highly prevalent.