Bodies of shame

To say that CII's recommendation is bad news for children, particularly girls, understates matters.

The sexual abuse of children in Pakistan is pervasive. It is reported regularly in the press and electronic media. It is rarely successfully prosecuted. Children, boys and girls, are regularly killed by those who abused them. Punjab is the only province that has a set of child protection laws and appropriately trained government appointed social workers to uphold them. Everywhere else, there is a patchwork of generally well-meaning but underfunded and under-regarded NGOs that do what they can to stem the tide, but it is pitifully little, given the scale of the problem. And that is the good news.



The really bad news is that one of the greyer areas of the child abuse spectrum just got darker and considerably more dangerous, particularly if you are a girl-child with parents who have decided to marry you below the legal age of consent. Some marriages are contracted with the child still in the womb, and in a time when the gender of an unborn child can be determined months before birth, this is a practice that is unlikely to fade away.

In the last week, it has been opined that underage marriage is not illegal, but that consummation of the union is only allowed when the couple reach puberty. Considering that the majority of marriages that are so contracted involve a male partner who is already far beyond puberty — and sometimes into an advanced old age — the caveat that on reaching puberty the child, almost invariably a girl, would have the right to undo the decision of their parent does not reflect the reality that women, let alone girls, have by and large not much say in matters that concern them directly, especially when it comes to decisions regarding marriage.

The body making these recommendation on the legalities of child marriages is advisory and consultative; it cannot of itself enact legislation, a privilege that remains with parliament and the provincial assemblies and for that, we may be truly thankful. That said, there will be those who see its pronouncements as being a rightful interpretation of the law and with the line between secular and religious fears imperfectly drawn, the decision will be seen by many as definitive. This is likely to be true in those parts of the country that incline towards radicalism and deep conservatism, and with both advancing at a rate of knots, it is not difficult to envisage swathes of the population taking these recent pronouncements at face value and as the word and letter of the law.

To say that this is bad news for children, and particularly girls, understates matters by several orders of magnitude. Girls and women are little more than portable property in much of the country. They are used as collateral for gambling debts, to settle tribal and family conflicts and as tokens of ‘honour’ that can see them married or sentenced to be raped or otherwise abused.

To declare child marriage to be lawful is tantamount to legalising a trade in children that will leave a minority aghast and slack-jawed, and a majority who either could not give a damn either way, or are rubbing their hands at the prospect of future opportunities for abuse.

The fact that it is unlikely that the recommendations are not going to make it to the statute books is an irrelevance. For many, they are a decisive voice. And the mindset that reduces women to chattels just got itself a considerable boost. Sadly, there does not appear to be a countervailing narrative of any weight or potency beyond some huffing and puffing in the Twitterverse, and as ever, there is nothing to be done but pity the children.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 14^th, 2014.

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