Child marriage

"It should be noted that children's games are not merely games. One should regard them as their most serious activities. "
~~Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

And yet so many children miss large parts of their childhood as a result of child marriages, child labour, child soldiers, child trafficking, and child abuse which covers all of these plus sexual abuse.

Photo Kamila Hyat/IRIN

The girl pictured above is 13 years old. Her daughter 8 months old.

There are several reasons for early/premature marriage, which happens primarily but not exclusively in sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia:

• Poverty: a girl can be considered a financial burden to the family and so the sooner she is married off the better. Alternatively where a dowry is expected, a younger girl would not be expected to have as large a dowry as an adult.
• Social ties: a girl can be offered to reinforce ties between families, or to settle a feud (so-called compensation marriages).
• Social status: girls and women are defined solely as wives and mothers.
• Control over sexuality: girls are married to protect their sexual purity and to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy - protecting the family honour.
• Fear of HIV: some men in African countries seek young virgin wives to ensure they are HIV free.

There are many reasons why this is a violation of fundamental rights, apart from the very important one of losing their childhood. Girls in particular suffer greatly from the consequences.

• For both boys and girls, early marriage stops their education and reduces their chances to develop personally.
• Girls become pregnant and give birth before their bodies are sufficiently mature. This can lead to complications or death.
• They rarely have any knowledge of birth control or issues such as sexually transmitted diseases/HIV.
• Girls are often married to much older men which leads to a power imbalance, frequently resulting in violence towards the young wife.

Some stories of child marriage can be seen in the photo essay from the ICRW, Too Young to Wed.

A good overview on the subject can be found on the Forward website.

A Walk to Beautiful

From the leaflet sent by Médecins Sans Frontières, a story of an 11 year old, raped, who became pregnant and had a very difficult birth. She ended up with a dead baby and an obstetric fistula. Four years later she had surgery to repair the fistula, a breach between the bladder and the vagina, but in the meantime her adolescence had been a time of suffering, misery and rejection.

Many women in Africa suffer a fistula because of a difficult birth, the result of pregnancy in the very young, or of female genital mutilation. They can rarely get to a hospital in time: they are too far away, there are no roads, there are no qualified surgeons. As a result the women become incontinent, are shunned even by their families, and live a reclusive life.

Thanks to the blog Rebuilding Sierra Leone One Child at a Time, in my sidebar as SaLonePikin (shorter), I have found out about the film A Walk to Beautiful. It is a documentary:
It tells the stories of five Ethiopian women who suffer from devastating childbirth injuries and embark on a journey to reclaim their lost dignity. Rejected by their husbands and ostracized by their communities, these women are left to spend the rest of their lives in loneliness and shame. The trials they endure -- and their attempts to rebuild their lives -- tell a universal story of hope, courage, and transformation. See also The Fistula Foundation.

I recommend the SaLonePikin blog if you are interested in Africa in general, or Sierra Leone in particular, and it has recipes too!

Combating FGM - UK and Norway

There have been a number of recent news reports about Female Genital Mutilation in Europe.

It started off in Norway with a flurry of newspaper articles.

First there was uproar in Norway over a television broadcast highlighting the fact that Norwegian born girls are taken back to Africa to be circumcised: "an alarming number of young girls born or living in Norway have been taken back to Somalia during school holiday periods and subjected to circumcision." There has been a law against FGM in Norway for 11 years.

Next there was a report to say that over 250 girls and women have asked for help over the last three years at Oslo's largest hospital after problems resulting from FGM. How many more are suffering in silence?

Thirdly, a piece saying that politicians want to put emergency measures in place. One of these proposals was to be mandatory genital screenings for girls at risk, but that must be approved by Parliament, which is currently on summer recess.

Then today two fairly similar news reports from the BBC.

The first is about Somali born Waris Dirie, now a top model, giving her account of being circumcised at the age of five, and, not unlike Papillon, her all-consuming anger:

Every day I still struggle to understand why this has happened to me - this cruel and terrible thing for which there is no reason or explanation - whatever they tell you about religion or purity. I can't tell you how angry I feel, how furious it makes me.

She has set up a foundation to work against FGM.

Next an item about the police putting up a £20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of anyone involved in FGM. They have timed this to coincide with the start of the school holidays, when they consider girls to be most at risk of being returned, mainly to Africa, for the ritual. The law in the UK to prevent girls being taken elsewhere for the purpose was passed in 2003 but so far no-one has been prosecuted.

The police are hoping they will get co-operation in this from the public because they don't want a situation to arise whereby girls returning from Africa are routinely screened.

That last is good news to me. Much as I am fiercely against FGM, the thought of young girls being screened as they return to the UK or Norway or anywhere else, worries me. I can't help but think it would be equally appalling for a girl who has been subjected to FGM as for one who has not, to be examined in that way.

Empowering women: Swaziland, Sierra Leone, Sudan

SWEEP, the Swazi Women's Economic Empowerment Project, has been working to enable to profit from their change of status in law. Until last year they could neither own property or open a bank account.

The programme has helped in the formation of 32 co-operatives with 47,000 beneficiaries. They give instruction to the women on how to set up a group and how to develop an enterprise.

The projects themselves are thought up and funded by the women themselves, anything from handicrafts, through animal rearing, to growing herbs. The aim is to free women from abusive situations, and from grinding poverty.


In Sierra Leone, new laws have been passed to ban forced marriages and abuse against wives, and to allow women to inherit property.

The law for registration of customary marriage states that both parties must be over 18 and both must give their consent.

The act banning domestic abuse has very broad definitions of violence: "physical or sexual abuse, economic abuse, emotional, verbal or psychological abuse, harassment, conduct that harms, endangers the safety, health or well-being of another person or undermines the privacy and dignity of another person".

The inheritance of property means that women, whose husbands have died, will not be left destitute by members of the extended family making claims on his property.


In Sudan, the Girls' Education Movement has been set up in an effort to combat the teenage pregnancy rate which is linked to the high drop-out rate of girls from education. It is a peer-to-peer group to encourage children and their parents to go to school. The longer girls stay at school, the more they are able to make informed decision and the less likely they are to become pregnant.

In addition, the government has brought in a policy of free education. This on its own may account for the increase in enrolment for girls from 17% to 37%.

Dr Bogaletch Gebre

Bogaletch Gebre grew up in rural Ethiopia where girls were not encouraged to attend school. In an effort to continue her studies she had to pretend to be fetching water when she went to lessons. Eventually she won scholarships and studied in Israel and the US, then started raising money to set up a women’s self help group, Kembatti Mentti Gezzimma, in Ethiopia. Her aim has been to empower people to make their own decisions, to strengthen women’s rights and combat female genital mutilation (FGM).

Rather than imposing solutions to problems, the group provides health, vocational, and environmental programmes which enable women make informed deicions for themselves. It is important to remember that people in rural villages may be illiterate, but that does not mean they are not intelligent.

Dr Gebre herself suffered FGM as a child, and two of her sisters died in childbirth as a result of complications caused by it. She says that fundamentally people do not want to cause any harm to their children so that when you get people talking about FGM they will ultimately reject it. Reform is achieved by addressing it as a problem not only for the individual, but also for the family and the community as a whole. The approach is based around community discussion groups.

Dr Gebre believes that gender discrimination is as harmful as racial discrimination and that educating women will lead to a far better society:

Mothers are primary educators whether or not they are so recognized, and whether or not they live in a literate or an oral society, or in something in between. If we truly desire to build a peaceful society, women as primary educators of young children are in the best position to begin the nurturing of peaceful people. But to be effective as teachers of peace they must be respected as women, and have access to education themselves.

From a recent article in The Lancet. Registration is required to read the article but it is free. It is also well worth while reading the longer account of how the self-help group started.

Too many women

Some time ago a couple of articles, one in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes and the other in Pediatrics, were published which demonstrated that in Africa more female babies than male babies were born infected with HIV . There could be two reasons for this: first that female foetuses were more susceptible to HIV infection than males, or secondly, that just as many male foetuses were infected but that they perished before being born, resulting in spontaneous abortions.

The latter reason appeared to be the case and would tie in with a study of elderly patients which suggests that men with particular genotypes may be less likely to survive.

I cannot find any further reference to this study of HIV infections leading to a higher birth rate of females but it seems to me that there are huge implications because of the resulting distortion of gender balance in the normal population.

Already in many African countries, women are having to shoulder the burdens left by war and AIDS.

In Swaziland, many farms have been left in the hands of women as a result of the world's highest HIV/AIDS infection rate. Until last year women were not allowed either own property or open a bank account.

In Mozambique, 30% of households are headed by women but although poverty has declined by 18%, in the female households it has declined by only 4%.

In Kenya, women are more likely to be illiterate (leading to ignorance) and living in poverty and this increases the likelihood of HIV infection. Cases in four districts had doubled to 20,000 and most of them women. Only 30% of women believe HIV could be avoided.

And of course, if there is a disproportionate number of women in the population, in some societies this could lead to an increase in female genital mutilation, in order to ensure the “attractiveness” of young women to the fewer potential husbands. A very full report on FGM can be found on the Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN) website. IRIN is part of UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Part of the plot?

Note: you have to register to view The Lancet but registration is free and the articles mentioned here are not restricted.

There was a letter in the Lancet this week, which starts off saying "Sadly, The Lancet is still part of the plot" in response to an earlier article "The Health of Women".

The earlier article, published for International Women's Day, states "no country in the world can women claim to have the same rights and opportunities as men. This is especially so in the context of health", giving as an example sexual and reproductive health accounting for a third of lost life-years in women of reproductive age.

The letter writer claims that yes, there is sexual inequality, but that the problem is men's health and not women's. He bases his argument on articles which discuss the UK and Australia, totally ignoring the situation in the developing world.

I really hope someone with a better understanding of the issues will reply.