First comes childhood, then comes arranged marriage

Source: Rachelle Dragani | Media Global

At an age when many of her Western peers were chatting about the dismal homecoming date prospects, Melka, a young Ethiopian woman, was forced into marrying one of those boys she barely knew.

She was 14 when she learned her parents, unbeknownst to her, had arranged a marriage for her. Later, Melka, with the help of authorities, got the marriage annulled and now volunteers at a nearby school to educate girls on their marriage rights. Now 20, her face and story are being used in a partnership between World Vision and 10×10, a global campaign for girl’s education.

It’s no secret that girls are an untapped resource in many parts of the world, and Richard Robbins directed a 10×10 film to take 10 girls and 10 writers to 10 developing countries and explore why that was.

“All the factors that are necessary to get an education, such as access to clean water, a stable home life, etc. are all part of the education equation, and poverty incredibly complicates that” 

Extreme Poverty

Extreme poverty can often lead to early marriages like Melka’s. Girls who get married rarely complete their education. That only adds to the cycle of poverty, since later in life these women often find themselves stuck in a situation where they can’t support themselves, and can’t fall back on any previous education to obtain a job. In addition, undeveloped adolescent bodies aren’t built for pregnancy, and are more likely to result in complications during childbirth, including death. In the developing world, one in three girls is married before she is 18, and one in seven before the age of 15.

It came as somewhat of a surprise to the 10×10 team to learn that in many of the places they visited, including Ethiopia and Afghanistan, parents weren’t thinking about those unintended consequences when they signed off on a marriage.

“From some people’s perspective, parents who are promising their girls into marriage at birth or at young ages could seem callous or unfeeling, but we found the opposite is true,” said Robbins.

“In these traditions and cultures, parents tend to be incredibly loving and dedicated, and see marriage as a way of protecting their children.”

An unmarried young woman, for example, runs the risk of being left without anyone to care for her, and parents are often eager to turn their daughter over to another’s protection. On one hand, said Robbins, that made his job easier than he had expected when the team sat down with parents who only believed they were doing what was best for their daughters.

“It’s so much easier to change when you can take a parent and convince them that there’s a better way to care for their children. In Ethiopia, we found that once we say down with many families, and fathers in particular, and explained to them the dangers that early marriage could expose young women to, they became converts,” said Robbins.

In Ethiopia, marriage before the age of 18 is illegal, increased from 15 years old in 2005. According to a 2011 UN report on World Fertility Policies, while men are marrying young, as well, they are more likely to be protected under minimum age guidelines. The report said that among the 187 countries with data for both women and men on the minimum legal age at marriage, 22 percent of countries had a lower age for women than they did for men. In 16 percent of the countries, women could marry before they turned 18, and in 4 percent the minimum age was 16.

Countries lack resources to enforce law

In places like Ethiopia, where 60 percent of girls will be married before their seventeenth birthdays despite the law, enforcement is a struggle, especially outside of urban areas.

Though most citizens are well aware of the rule, it’s an easy one to circumvent, especially when parents aren’t aware of the reasoning behind the law. Some parents hide a marriage within another ceremony, such as an Easter celebration, so as not to attract attention to a festive gathering.

When the law is brought to the attention of authorities, it’s often enforced, as was the case with Melka’s parents. But the country doesn’t have the resources to staff the rural countryside with officers jailing parents who work their way around it.

Alternate pathways to education

Advocates for ending early marriage practices, then, are aware that pushing for enforcing policies that make young unions illegal is only a start. “We want to explore alternative pathways to education, so that when early marriage does happen, it’s not necessarily the end of the road,” said Robbins.

When girls stop school for even a short period of time after marriage and perhaps to have children of their own, they are too far behind to re-enter a traditional classroom.

Even Melka, who was forced to quit school after her marriage, felt as if she couldn’t go back to school after her marriage was annulled because she had missed too much and couldn’t catch up. Alternatives such as accelerated learning programs could help women manage a home life and still have their education, said Robbins.

Plans that promise such compromises are relatively well received in developing areas. There, well-meaning parents are aware of the value of girls education over sending their daughters to work or to get married, but must be more concerned with where that week’s food is coming from.

Keeping all sides happy

Robbins reflected on presentations in Cambodia and Afghanistan where fathers – even Afghan fathers hoping to adhere to strict Sharia law mandating that women and men be educated separately – didn’t contradict his arguments about the merit of women’s education. Instead, they told him, the need for another worker in the household simply had to come first.

NGOs and local governments are looking for ways to keep all sides happy. Initiatives such as putting bikes in the hands of Cambodian girls to make the trek to a free school easier, empowering all-girls karate classes to children living on the streets of Egypt, and programs that combine working and education are becoming the best guarantee that a girl who starts her education will finish it without becoming a wife.

“Some people have tended to believe that these communities are against educating their girls, and the reality is that most are not. But they don’t always have the access to education, or they’re too poor to be able to devote that kind of time,” said Robbins. “By and large we have come to believe that the obstacles of education to girls aren’t cultural, but we just need to help get the obstacles out of the way.”