Child marriages continue to plague minor girls

The rocky years of adolescence are rarely a smooth sail for budding adults, with sudden physical, emotional and psychological changes taking a huge toll on their overall wellbeing. While an awkward pimple or emotional breakdown might exhaust an average teenager coping with the upsetting effects of puberty, for minor girls in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) yoked forcefully into marriage way before their legal age, the changes associated with adolescence would be nothing in comparison to the abruptness of their awakening into married life.

Even after three successive tenures, the PTI government in K-P has been unsuccessful in passing formal legislation against the pervasive practice of child marriages in the province, which currently reports the highest percentage of the practice in the country. Although, Punjab and Sindh have devised special laws against the cultural vice by making amendments to the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, K-P continues to follow the century-old law, which allows more and more young girls to end up with henna on their hands way before they are physically and emotionally matured to handle the expectations of marriage.

One such girl was a 13-year minor from Charsadda, who was recently rescued from her forced marriage to a 72-year-old elderly man, who had promised to pay Rs500,000 to her father as part of the terms of the marriage contract. Even though the groom and Nikah registrar were arrested by the police, the girl’s father managed to escape. While this girl was lucky to escape a life of endless drudgery and unceasing reproduction, the practice continues to rob countless young girls of their innocence and dreams in the province, where a total of 153 cases of child marriage were reported between May 2011 and December 2023 across 12 districts, while countless others remained unknown.

According to Advocate Zara Ishtiaq, legal advisor to the National Commission for Human Rights, the current, dated law on child marriages must be amended in order to bring about a decrease in the occurrence of the practice. “Earlier some efforts were undertaken by the previous government to amend the law but due to the objection of some Islamic parties the matter was referred to the Islamic Ideology Council and a decision is still pending. Until or unless, an exemplary punishment is given to the culprits caught involved in child marriages, these cases will continue to grow in the province,” opined Ishtiaq.

Agreeing with Ishtiaq, Imran Takkar, Provincial Coordinator of Group Development Pakistan, was of the opinion that early marriages in K-P were driven by a mix of cultural, economic, and social factors. “Poverty, traditional customs, societal pressures, lack of education and awareness alongside an overarching web of gender inequality, all contribute towards the incidence of child marriages,” asserted Takkar, who felt that enforcing and raising the legal age of marriage could curb the practice.

“Pakistan has the sixth highest number of child brides in the world, that is at least 1.9 million. More than 21 per cent of girls in Pakistan are married before the age of 18 and 3 per cent before the age of 15, out of which the majority of cases, 29 per cent are reported from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. If child marriages are stopped, we could potentially bring about a rise in earnings of 6229 million U.S. dollars by 2023,” said Qamar Naseem, a human rights activist.