Child marriage

The practice of girls marrying at a young age is mostly common in Southern parts of Asia. In India, especially in Rajasthan and other villages girls being married at early age is so common. In most of the places when a girl is born her marriage gets fixed by the boy in their neighborhood and when they become teens they knots are being tied up. Elders don’t care about how such a young boy will earn or what future they will hold but they are more concerned about their tradition. When we look at it from the girl's point of view, we find that the she is too young and even uneducated to know her rights or what is good for her, she is in no position to make any decisions about her life, spacing of babies, food, rest or sexual preference. In most cases she submits herself to whatever her husband and her in-laws decide without having any say in the matter, thus making early marriage something she has to put up with.

Child marriage violates every human right to which a child is entitled: the right to health, to education, to equality, to liberty and security of the person and of course the right to make a free and informed choice of a spouse. It shows how the practice of child marriage reinforces the basic problem of low levels of health, and education among women. It also contains a powerful critique of the state of the law as well as the confusions, contradictions, and lack of gender sensitivity inherent in the provisions of various statutes dealing with the age of marriage, the age of consent, and the validity of marriage.

The legal age of marriage in India is 18 for women and 21 for men. A survey conducted on child marriages states that total of 44.5% of the women had been wed by the time they were 18, set as the legal age for marriage since 1978. Of these, 22.6% had been married before the age of 16 and 2.6% before the age of 13. It is hard to know the exact number of child marriages as so many are unregistered and unofficial. Survey data is available for around 100 countries and show that:

 Girls living in the poorest 20 per cent of households are more likely to get married at an early age than those living in the wealthiest 20 per cent.

 Women with primary education are significantly less likely to be married in union as children than those who received no education.

Parents choose to marry off their daughters early for a number of reasons. Poor families may regard a young girl as an economic burden and her marriage as a necessary survival strategy for her family. They may think that child marriage offers protection for their daughter from the dangers of sexual assault, or more generally, offers the care of a male guardian. Child marriage may also be seen as a strategy to avoid girls becoming pregnant outside marriage. Gender discrimination can also underpin child marriage. Girls may be married young to ensure obedience and subservience within their husband’s household and to maximize their childbearing.

Child marriage can have serious harmful consequences for children, including:

Denial of education, once married, girls tend not to go to school. It also effect on girl’s health as it leads to premature pregnancies, which cause higher rates of maternal and infant mortality. Teenage girls are also more vulnerable to sexually-transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS. Therefore, each and every child and their parents should know about the consequences of early marriage.