Girls Deserve Better - and not just in Nigeria
BY PRACHI VIDWANS MAY 16, 2014
Four weeks have passed since Boko Haram, the radical Islamist group in Nigeria, kidnapped hundreds of high school girls from their dormitory beds. 276 of the girls currently remain in their clutches. In a video released in early May, a Boko Haram militant said they planned to "sell [the girls] in the market" and "give their hands in marriage." The scale and audacity of this attack makes it especially shocking, and the case has triggered an extraordinary outpouring of indignation across the globe -- on a scale that isn't necessarily typical in cases involving violence against women. As FP commentator Lauren Wolfe observed in her recent article, women are often abducted in conflicts around the world without generating much of an international reaction. And as the New York Times recently pointed out, Boko Haram's ransom video suggests that the group itself has been surprised by the degree of global outrage.
The militants, indeed, don't seem to have any pronounced sense that they're doing anything wrong. "This [northern Nigeria] is a place that is very conservative about women's roles," says Sally Engle Merry, a professor of anthropology and law at New York University. "The extremists may have assumed that girls were relatively powerless and unimportant." The idea that girls cannot make their own choices was taken for granted. To the militants, kidnapping is not radical: Education is.
It's important to stress that these men are extremists who don't represent northern Nigeria as a whole. Yet it's hard to imagine their actions outside of a context where young women are seen as incapable of deciding their own fates. In Nigeria, according to a 2013 Ford Foundation survey, 39 percent of girls are married off before the age of 18, and in 2009, 26 percent of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 were in polygamous unions. In general, child marriage has disastrous consequences: Victims of child marriage are more likely to suffer domestic violence, contract AIDS, and experience complications in birth and pregnancy. They are also far more likely to be illiterate, undereducated, and poor. The same study found that more girls are affected by child marriage in Nigeria than in the rest of West African countries put together, and that child marriage is most prevalent in the country's north. It's precisely to combat the widespread nature of this phenomenon that Nigerian activists have set out to build a network of programs that are making headway in combating the practice of child marriage -- especially in the north, and especially through education programming for girls. The fact that the abducted girls were in school is testament to that fact.
The Boko Haram attack is a particularly radical version of the various forms of coercion that are applied to girls in Nigeria, and across the world, every day -- and which all too often goes unnoticed and unreported. In some societies in South Asia and the Middle East, young women forced into marriage are punished and sometimes even killed when they resist the choices their families have made for them; such "honor crimes" typically only make the headlines when the consequences reverberate into Western countries unused to such practices. In this case, the victims are individuals, and the perpetrators are members of their own families (typically older brothers).
Read more at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/05/16/girls_deserve_better_and_not_just_in_nigeria?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Charles Pensulo in Blantyre
Guardian Professional, Wednesday 21 May 2014 02.00 EDT
NGOs are working to offer young brides more choices, but complain there's a lack of political will to address the issue
At 16, Christina Asima is responsible for raising three siblings. She also gave birth last year, delivering via caesarian section. But despite her dependents, Christina made the decision to walk out on her husband last year. "I started a relationship with a boy who lives here in the village. The boy would support me sometimes with money," said Christina. "Things changed when I discovered that I was pregnant. I went to live at his home but he was just a boy and his parents shunned me." She believes that it was the parents who made their son hostile to her. This made Christina walk out of the marriage and take care of the pregnancy alone. When asked why they were not protecting themselves during sex she said: "I had no say in the affairs of our relationship. He was supporting me and he is the man. When he said we should do it without condom I couldn't object."
Christina's story is just one of many cases of early marriages in Malawi where on average one out of two girls is married by her eighteenth birthday. A report called Marrying Too Young, published last year by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), said that 50% of women aged 20-24 were married before the age of 18 in Malawi, the eighth highest figure in the world. The report was published to urge decision-makers to sharpen their focus on protecting girls' human rights. "No society can afford the lost opportunity, waste of talent, or personal exploitation that child marriage causes," wrote Dr Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of UNFPA.
"This just shows that as a country, we have failed in protecting the rights of our girl-children," said Grace Mkandawire, communications advisor at Girls Empowerment Network (Genet) a local non-governmental organisation for advancing the rights and status of women in Malawi. "There is no political will in addressing the challenges [of child marriage] and unless there is political motivation, the battle against it will bear no fruits." The penal code of Malawi sets the age for sexual consent at 16. This was a milestone for the country in 2011, as prior to this the age was 13. But Mkandawire observed that with the law it is difficult to protect girls from early marriages if they are at least 16.
A survey by Human Rights Watch, published this year, links the high prevalence of child marriages in Malawi to poverty, teenage pregnancy and lack of adequate education. It states: "These factors are all interlinked and heightened by a lack of strong judicial and government policy framework to ensure that existing laws designed to prevent and address child marriage are enforced." In response to the need to improve young people's understanding of their rights regarding reproductive health, PSI Malawi is re-launching a national radio magazine people for young people. Youth Alert! originally ran from 2003 to 2009, reaching over 300,000 students across the country through radio and other activities. It broadcasted messages on sexually-transmitted infections, HIV prevention and unwanted pregnancies.
Read more at: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2014/may/21/malawi-women-marriage-child-pregnancy
