Early Child Marriage in Pakistan
(Nabeela Waheed, Islamabad)
According to recent reports, 24
per cent of girls married under the age of 18 worldwide last year were from
rural Pakistan, whereas 18 per cent were from the country’s urban areas. The
issue of child marriage raises several health concerns for young girls, some of
which include pregnancy complications, health risks for babies born to young
mothers and the risk of death. The reports said that girls pregnant under the
age of 15 have a five times greater chance of dying compared with girls pregnant
in their 20s. In Pakistan, there are various causes of early or child marriages.
The most amongst those causes are: extremely weak legislation; lack of
implementation of the existing laws; children are treated commodities/slaves;
tribal and feudal structure of society; lack of awareness in the public about
harmful effect of child marriages; extreme poverty; internal trafficking; and
lack of will in the government. Another important cause of the child marriage is
ineffective and non-responsive birth registration system. The birth registration
for children, especially girls is never prioritized, which gives room for
manipulation of the age of the child/girls at the time of marriage. In addition,
there are no central, independent and strong child rights bodies that could
monitor child rights violations including the issue of child marriages.
Psychological impact on the girls when they enter into such relationships they
are young the education and background and hostility of relationships and
environment like dispute settlement further adds to their miseries. Limited
choices and bodily control Awareness about reproductive rights and information
of contraceptives is often lacking, which results in teenage pregnancies, and
large family size. Thus they are unable to break the poverty cycle as large
family size prohibits them from educating their children. While the Child
Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 says that the police cannot intervene directly in
underage marriage, implying that Sharia law is to be consulted, the government
needs to intervene. Child marriage should be prohibited and the legal age of
marriage should be raised from 16 to 18. Pakistan is signatory to the UN
Convention on the Rights of the Children which defines child marriage below the
age of 18; yet, the country allows marriages at age 16. Girls’ education has
been promoted by the federal and provincial governments as well as by the CSOs
including media. Pakistan’s National Education Policy prepared under the
Education for All and Millennium Development Goals greatly focusing on
eliminating gender disparity in education and encouraging families to send their
girls to schools. Although the federal and provincial government has taken many
positive measures in this regard and Governments have initiated campaigns for
enhancement of literacy specially for promotion of primary education for girls
in rural areas but also there is need to work a lot on it and the civil society
also needs to work towards eradicating certain false assumptions in our culture,
such as that religion sanctions child marriage.