Child marriages

The persistence in following barbaric cultural traditions is a sad reality in modern-day Pakistan, with child marriage close to the top of the list of customs that must simply be done away with. Young girls are regularly forced to become mothers and are subjected to socially-accepted sexual exploitation in the absence of stronger legislation against the practice of child marriage. To date, one in four girls is married before the age of 18 in Pakistan. A joint project of Save the Children and Oxfam called “Bachpan Bachao” was recently launched to curb the practice of child marriage in Punjab and Sindh. More than 40 per cent of Pakistani brides are under 18, whereas eight per cent of adolescent married women are already mothers between the ages of 15 and 19, according to statistics discussed at the project launch. Meanwhile, Unicef, in its “State of the World’s Children Report 2014” has said that seven per cent of girls in Pakistan are married while under the age of 15.

Although we are faced with such disturbing statistics, little has been done to prevent child marriages. Punjab, the most populous province, has yet to pass legislation against this practice, despite the success seen on this front in Sindh last year when the provincial assembly abolished it. The UN estimated last year that more than 140 million girls younger than 18 will be married to men as old as 60 in the next decade and most of these marriages would be in South Asia. Pakistan should not allow itself to become a hub for child marriages, where minors, under coercion and violence, are married — often young girls to men much older than them. Such practices cannot be justified as this is nothing more than permissible sexual abuse and often just a means of using girls as a financial transaction or to compensate for a male family member’s crime. If we ever want to see a country where there is gender equality and women empowerment, this room for exploitation must be closed.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 17^th,  2015.

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