Author: Ben Arnoldy
Publication: The Christian Science Monitor
Date: April 24, 2009
URL: http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0424/p06s07-wosc.html
India listens after a child bride says 'I
won't.'
The girl's courage has prompted India, where
nearly half of all females wed before age 18, to consider the consequences
of marrying young.
When Rekha Kalindi was nearing age 12, her
parents told her they were planning to marry her off. Rekha's response would
reverberate all the way up to the president of India: "No."
Nearly half of all Indian females get married
before turning the legal minimum age of 18. The requirement has been in place
for more than three decades, but centuries of custom don't change overnight
- and that's especially true in Bararola, a land carved up into small farm
plots and crisscrossed by dirt paths that takes at least a day's journey to
reach from Calcutta. But even here, some people are taking a stand.
Many locals eke out a living making beedis,
a leaf-wrapped Indian cigarette. Rekha was rolling beedis with her parents
inside their mud-hut home when they broached her nuptials.
"I was very angry," says Rekha.
"I told my father very clearly that this is my age of studying in school,
and I didn't want to marry."
With the help of friends, teachers, and administrators,
Rekha accomplished what the law alone has not. No child marriages have taken
place in the surrounding villages where she and two other girls refused to
marry last summer, and similar approaches are meeting some success in other
regions.
"We have a strong law and we need to
find the people who can advocate for [it]," says Sunayana Walia, a senior
researcher at the Delhi office of the International Center for Research on
Women. "All the [successful] interventions are tapping the girls ...
so they are able to campaign on this issue, along with community participation."
Determined not to follow her sister's path
South Asia has the world's highest levels
of child marriage. A paper published in the Lancet,a British medical journal,
in March found that 44.5 percent of Indian women who recently reached 20 to
24 years of age had been married by the time they were 18. Of these, 22.6
percent were wed before age 16 - and 2.6 percent before 13.
Child brides face greater health risks and
their babies tend to be sicker, weaker, and less likely to survive childhood,
according to UNICEF. The child-welfare agency also cites research from Harvard
University that found that even a one-year postponement of marriage increases
these girls' schooling level by a third of a year, and their literacy by 5
percent to 10 percent.
Rekha learned about the dangers of child marriage
firsthand when her older sister got married at age 11. She is now illiterate,
and lost all four of her children within one year of birth.
"I had a talk with my sister," Rekha
says. "She said, 'You have seen me, I've lost my children.... It's good
you stood against child marriage.' "
Rekha had other motivations as well. Like
many children here, she had to leave school to work for her family. But she
was granted a rare second chance to improve her education through a goverment
program called the National Child Labour Project, which, in her district of
Purulia, offers remedial education to 4,500 children. Rekha says she did not
want to stop school again on account of marriage.
"They love to come to school," says
Prosenjit Kundu, the district project director. "These schools are the
only place where they are treated as children. Otherwise, they are workers."
Yet they aren't entirely sheltered from the
adult world. Five children from each school are bused to extra lessons in
the nearby city through the Child Activist Initiative, which is partly funded
and supported by UNICEF. The kids, including Rekha, are given leadership training
and informed of their rights on a range of issues from forced labor to the
legal age for marriage. The girls think up solutions and teach others back
in the village.
The Purulia program is new, but has already
helped Rekha and two other girls refuse to marry under age - saving, by example,
many of their friends from the same situation. Similar child rights programs
backed by UNICEF operate across India and involve more than 60,000 children
in Bangladesh. The programs are also credited with recently helping another
girl in Nepal refuse early marriage.
Even the president is listening
In Rekha's case, her parents initially did
not listen to her. But she soon went to friends and teachers. They all came
to talk with Rekha's parents, including Mr. Kundu, the government official.
That collective support for her and work with her parents was crucial, says
Kundu.
"Children are not taken seriously in
families," he says. "A girl of 11.5 years who takes a decision for
her own against the family members' will - this is an enormous, courageous
act."
During a visit from two foreign journalists,
the barefoot Rehka, dressed in bright purple and yellow, fielded questions
confidently, despite the crowd the interview attracted. In February, she addressed
a gathering of 6,000 beedi workers, asking them to allow their children to
stay in school and delay marriage. Her best friend, Budhamani Kalindi, says
she hasn't gotten any pressure to marry now that Rekha has become such a role
model.
"It's terrific how you get that ripple
effect of one being brave, sticking her neck out ... and then others following,"
says Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for UNICEF in Delhi.
Those ripples extend all the way to the president
of India, Shrimati Pratibha Devisingh Patil, who, after reading about Rekha
in the Hindustan Times newspaper, has requested to meet her. That makes her
father happy, and he says he supports her staying in school.
The custom has proved hard to change, says
Ms. Crowe, partly because it's often embedded in poverty. Sometimes parents
marry off a daugter to lighten their economic burden, though the problem extends
into the middle and upper classes too, she adds. It's also incorrectly assumed
that an early marriage will protect the girl from violence and sexual abuse
from men.
Enforcement of age laws, meanwhile, is hampered
by the lack of birth records. Only 40 percent of births in India are registered;
in Bangladesh, the number is just 10 percent.
"You can't prove a child is a child if
you've got no certificate," Crowe says. The international community is
working hard on birth registration, she says, but it's a daunting task in
a place like India that has more than 1 billion people.
Back in Bararola, one of those billions faces
a brighter future. Rekha says she wants to be a teacher when she grows up.
Is she open to marriage eventually? "Anything
after 18," she says, "but not before 18 at all."
