Raising the age of marriage for girls should be an important goal in a country like Pakistan.
ISLAMABAD: I write with reference to Arshad Mahmood’s article of November 23 titled “Protecting our children – I”.
Raising the age of marriage for girls should be an important goal in a country like Pakistan. I can give one example that I recently came across in a Unicef report. It said that a 16-year-old girl had gone through four pregnancies. Two of these ended in miscarriages and one baby died a few days after birth. The only baby that survived caught pneumonia since the teenaged mother could not take proper care of her child. At the age of 16 a girl should be in school/college and not have to raise her own child.
Similarly, children who drop out of school and juvenile offenders are extremely vulnerable to all kinds of abuse and the state has to take effective measures to protect their lives and future. The government needs to ensure that its commitment to the Convention of the Rights of the Child is fully implemented.
Sadia Chaudhry
Published in The Express Tribune, November 24th, 2010.
