Writes Demeter, LUDCI.eu Editorial team
It’s a sunny Thursday afternoon. Kids can be heard laughing and playing in backyards throughout various neighbourhoods. In one of those, in the backroom of a church, Maria’s mother gently places a tiara on her perfectly coiffed hair and smiles at her little girl. She then takes a dingy brown teddy bear from her hands and replaces it with a bouquet of gardenias picked from their garden – a garden that Maria was playing in just two days ago when she celebrated her 10th birthday.
Maria stands up, tears in her eyes, and a death grip on the bouquet. She does not understand why she has to do this but her mother insisted that this is what good little girls do. She readies herself to walk down the aisle to her husband-to-be, 45-year-old Justin Burns.
This is not a movie. Neither is it the beginning of a gory fictional story. Maria has, in fact, become another child bride.
According to UNICEF, child marriage refers to any formal marriage or informal union between a child under the age of 18 and an adult or another child. 12 million girls under 18 years are married each year and 650 million alive today were married as children. While the prevalence of child marriage has decreased worldwide – from one in four girls married a decade ago to approximately one in five today, if efforts to stop this gross violation of child and human rights, as well as child abuse are not accelerated, more than 150 million additional girls will marry before their 18th birthday by 2030.
The good news is that media coverage about child marriage has reached an all-time high with more news stories bringing the harsh reality faced by 15 million girls a year to light (Girls Not Brides). And people have started to listen.
Child marriage, while it is most common in developing countries also raises its ugly head in developed countries, such as the United States. This is precisely what the BBC Three Documentary ‘America’s Child Bride’, which premiered on March 22, 2019, aimed to highlight. The three-part documentary follows British journalist Ellie Flynn as she journeys to the United States to find out why the country still has laws that allow older men to marry girls under the age of 16.
While the minimum age in most US states is 18, there are 46, which allow those younger than 18 to marry, according to Unchained At Last, a non-profit organisation that works to end forced and child marriage in the United States. But how much younger? Frighteningly, there are no laws that set a minimum age below which a child cannot marry.
When Flynn arrives at the record office in Spartanburg County, she finds 16 child marriages in the county in the last decade. In 10 of these cases, the groom could have been prosecuted under statutory rape laws. Instead, they got married to their victims.
“I think what surprised me was the fact that you can get out of this statutory rape charge by essentially marrying the victim,” Flynn said.
One of those marriages was between Keri, 15, and Paul, 24.
Keri met Paul at a party on her 15th birthday. The two hit it off and slept together that night. Keri became pregnant. She recounts that it was Paul’s idea to get married so he would not be charged for statutory rape. Paul managed to convince Keri that him being in jail would not be beneficial to her or their child. Keri relented. The only obstacle in getting married now was parental consent.
Paul knew that Keri’s father liked to drink. It did not take much to convince him that marriage was a good plan.
Keri describes her marriage to Paul as ‘horrible’, recalling how he treated her ‘like a maid’. She never got the chance to complete high school after their son was born.
“That’s a big regret,” she laments. ‘You can’t even get a job at McDonald’s without getting a high-school diploma.”
According to a World Bank report (2017) child brides are much more likely to drop out of school and complete fewer years of education than their peers who do not marry early.
Keri’s story is not an anomaly. CBSN Originals documentary ‘Speaking Frankly: Child marriage estimated that 200, 000 children under age 18 were married in the US between 2000 and 2015. 87 percent were girls and 86 percent were married to adults. The documentary follows the stories of child marriage survivors and advocates Genevieve Meyer, Sherry Johnson, and Naila Amin, US citizens whom all got married before their 18th birthday to adults. Unfortunately, not even the law was there to protect them as marriage laws in the US are regulated at the state level and currently, 48 states have loopholes that allow marriage under the age of 18.
15-year-old Genevieve lived in a trailer park with her mother, who had not bothered to enrol her daughter in school. Genevieve, therefore, spent her days at home or by her 42-year-old neighbour’s house as he had two children.
The two would eventually start having sex and when Genevieve’s mother found out, she reported it to the police, and the neighbour was arrested. Not long after however, her mother changed her mind, feeling remorse for sending a father of two to prison. She convinced her teenage daughter that it was her fault and the only way to fix the problem was by marrying him. As his wife, she did not testify against him and the charges were dropped.
Sherry Johnson’s ordeal as a child bride was first carried by CNN on February 1, 2018. With a gripping headline: ‘Sherry Johnson was raped, pregnant and married by 11’, one’s moment of shock and disgust for the laws that failed her turns to hope that
her fight to end child marriage in Florida will be successful. It has to be.
Because this is the face of the 11-year-old who stood in a courtroom and said ‘I do’ to her 20-year-old rapist.
“I was eight years old when I was raped for the first time by a man who worked at my mother’s church; this continued until I became pregnant at 9 years old. At the age of 10, I gave birth to my first child. Child welfare authorities began investigating my family and church as a result, and my mother insisted that the only way to quell their inquiry was for me to get married.
No one asked Sherry what she wanted. After making her wedding dress and cake, Sherry’s mother took her to a courthouse to meet and marry the man whose baby she carried. That courthouse said no. So, her mother drove to another. The only requirement there was for Sherry to sign a document verifying that she had a baby.
By the time Sherry was 17 years old, she had six children, an elementary-level education and a husband that disappeared each time she got pregnant.
“They took the handcuffs off him and put them on me the day they allowed an 11-year-old to get married,” Sherry said.
Fraidy Reiss, founder of Unchained At Last, underscores in the gripping documentary a pregnant teenager who gets married under 18 years, is more likely to suffer at the hands of her partner than her single counterpart.
Girls her age played with baby dolls. Sherry found herself with real babies.
She washed diapers, cleaned the house, and cooked one-pot stews. Her husband rarely spoke with her; she was just there for sex. They struggled to pay the bills.
Child brides are likely to get pregnant earlier and multiple times; 50 percent more likely to drop out of high school and four times less likely to finish college. They face the risk of divorce by up to 80 percent. They are by 31 percent more likely to end up living in poverty as an adult.
They also face a 23 percent increased risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and cancer.
“This can literally kill them,” says Reiss. And for Naila Amin, it almost did. Naila was picked up from school and whisked away at age 15 to Pakistan to marry her adult cousin who desperately wanted a green card.
“I was an American citizen, just plucked up and placed in one of the most dangerous places in Pakistan. I was forced to marry a man I did not know or liked. I was not even sure what to do as a wife,” says Naila.
And that uncertainty cost her. ‘I had to cook, clean, and take care of his family. At nights, I was repeatedly raped.”
When she could no longer take it, she ran away. But having no money or friends that would take her in, she was forced to call an uncle to come to get her. After promising that he understood and all would be well at home, he took her back to her husband.
“I remember sitting in the vehicle when we arrived home and I heard the distinct sound of a shotgun. I knew I was going to die and wondered if the bullet would sting or if they would acid me first.”
They did neither. Instead, they dragged her from the car and beat her viciously with electrical wires, while forcing her mother and sister to watch. This would serve as a warning to them.
Naila eventually managed to leave her husband and Pakistan. After the divorce, his green card was revoked but the memories still haunt Naila. In an interview on Matter of Fact, a weekly news magazine hosted by Soledad O’Brien and distributed to TV stations by Sony Pictures Television, Reiss spoke passionately about the loophole in US immigration law that: ‘sets no minimum age to petition for a foreign spouse/fiancé or to be the beneficiary of a spousal fiancé visa. As a result, girls in the US are forced to marry adult men overseas who want a US visa and a child bride’.
“I was just a passport,” Naila says.
Reiss has since helped to write legislation to end or reduce child marriage that has already been introduced and in some cases, already passed in multiple US states. Since 2018, four states, Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania have banned underage marriages without exception. American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands, United States territories, have also ended child marriage at that time.
But states like Missouri have yet to catch up.
In a Kansas City Star series released March 2018, Missouri profiled as having the most lenient law in the nation, allowing 15-year-olds to wed. Only one parent’s signature is required.
More than 1, 000 15-year-olds have been married in Missouri since 1999. Even children ages 14, 13 and 12 can marry in Missouri — it’s one of 25 states with no minimum age requirement. For those 14 and younger, a judge’s consent is required.
And this lack of legislature is what made a pregnant 15-year-old Brittany Koerselman and 21-year-old Jeremie Rook, her boyfriend and the father of her baby drive 400 miles from Little Rock, Iowa, near the Minnesota border to get to Minnesota. Although Brittany had no plans of ever getting married, she felt she had no choice. It was either prison for the man she loved or borrowing a white prom dress and saying ‘I do’ barefooted as her swollen feet could no longer fit in her shoes.
Not old enough to drive home or have a celebratory drink after her own wedding, Brittany simply had to resign herself to the belief that she had “done the right thing,” and prayed that her marriage would stand the test of time. It lasted for 3 years.
“I was 15 years old,” she said. “I was pregnant. I was still in school. He did not have a job yet. Plus, the pressure. I didn’t see things going in a very good direction.”
Research shows that between 70-80% of marriages involving individuals under age of 18 ends in divorce and nationally, girls and young women aged 16-24 experience the highest rates of intimate partner violence among all such victims, and girls aged 16-19 face victimisation rates almost triple the national average.
Such was the case of Trevicia Williams, whose story was highlighted by Huffington Post, August 2017.
Trevicia knows first-hand what it is like to go from child to wife in a single afternoon. When she was 14, her mother picked her up from school and told her she was getting married that day. After a quick trip to a courthouse in Harris County, Texas, she was hitched to a 26-year-old ex-convict she barely knew.
She was never given a reason for the marriage and she certainly had no interest in being a wife.
“Marriage was not something I had a concept of or really understood,” Williams said.
At 15, she got pregnant. Her husband was violent and abusive, she said, and their life together was traumatic and unstable. When she was 16, he went back to prison. That’s when she found an organisation that helped her to file for divorce.
Globally, the highest rates of child marriage are seen in West and Central Africa, where over four in ten girls are married before age 18. In terms of numbers, South Asia is home to the largest numbers of child brides. In Ethiopia, 4 in 10 girls are married before the age of 18 and 14 percent are married before their 15th birthday. According to UNICEF, Ethiopia has the 15th highest prevalence rate of child marriage in the world and the fifth-highest absolute number of child brides – a shocking 15 million.
Films, like documentaries, are placing more emphasis on the issue of child marriages and showing the public and decision-makers that these girls are not numbers but humans, whose rights and childhood have been stripped away.
The award-winning film ‘Difret’, 2014, was executive produced by Angelina Jolie and sheds light on Ethiopia’s oldest and most deeply-rooted traditions. The drama is based on the inspirational true story of 14-year-old Hirut who is abducted in her rural village’s tradition of kidnapping women for marriage. She fights back, accidentally killing her captor and intended husband.
The local law demands a death sentence for her but a tough, passionate female lawyer steps in to fight for her.
In 2015, U.S. based Ms. Magazine, the single mainstream publication dedicated to voicing feminist issues devoted an entire issue to child marriage groups like Girls Not Brides USA and featured Jolie on its cover.
“Difret” colleagues designed a petition calling on the U.S. Government to end child marriage; this petition was delivered to the Department of State in late September 2015 with more than 135,000 signatures. It elicited promises by State Department officials to publish an Adolescent Girl Strategy during 2016.
The first-ever U.S. Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls, launched in March 2016. It brings together four U.S. government agencies – the State Department, USAID, the Peace Corps, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation to tackle barriers that keep adolescent girls from achieving their full potential.
Most recently, the 14-minute animated short film, “Sitara: Let Girls Dream”, by Academy Award Winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy was screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
In the film, a 14-year-old girl named Pari from Pakistan has her dream of being a pilot crushed when she is forced into child marriage. The film’s goal is to encourage conversations and awareness of the issue, along with inspiring young girls to dream.
To further raise awareness of child marriage, Sitara: Let Girls Dream is being shown in schools and in community centres around the world with support from Gucci. The film is now on Netflix and available in 190 countries.
The animated short follows in the footsteps of Girl Rising, a more serious take on child marriage released in 2014.
Described as ‘powerful’, Girl Rising is an informative, educational documentary that follows the life stories of nine girls from the developing world, who struggle every day for freedom, education and a voice in their home countries of Cambodia, Haiti, Nepal, Ethiopia, India, Peru, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan – countries where education for girls is not a priority. Directed by Oscar-nominated documentarian Richard Robbins (Operation Homecoming) and narrated by A-list stars including Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, and Selena Gomez, the film explores the dangerous inequalities that girls and young women face in parts of the world.
The film has since birthed a movement with a curriculum to allow the film to be taught in schools. In addition to shaping public discourse on child marriage, the media should hold decision-makers to account for fulfilling their responsibilities to protect and uphold the public’s welfare. This can be achieved through praise or calling them out for a lack of action (Girls Not Brides).
November 2018, CNN placed the spotlight on social media giant Facebook when it flagged two live posts discussing the sale of a child bride, a 16 or 17 girl from South Sudan. According to reports, an auction was discussed on the platform and the girl was bid on by five men, some of whom were reportedly high-ranking South Sudanese government officials.
The father reportedly received 500 cows, three cars, and $10,000 in exchange for his daughter. Facebook responded by saying the post was taken down on November 9, but CNN reported seeing posts up to November 23. CNN said it reached out to the man who won the bidding, as well as the girl’s family to no avail.
However, NGOs like Plan International and Equality Now joined the call on Facebook to improve its monitoring practices.
In her statement to CNN, she said “They ought to put in place more human resources to monitor their platform to ensure the rights of all people, are protected.”
Plan International also called on the South Sudanese government to investigate and suspend any officials involved in the bridal auction.
Stephanie Sinclair, a visual journalist and founder of Too Young To Wed has also created a stir with her riveting snapshots of child brides around the world. Stephanie began covering child marriage in Afghanistan when she was working as a conflict reporter and saw girls in Herat, setting themselves on fire because of the overwhelming frustrations in their marriages. She notes that many of the girls in the burn ward had been married by age 9, 10, or 11.
Her story and the first set of images ran in National Geographic (2011), garnering immense attention and coverage. She has since been to more than 10 countries to take photographs of the issue. With assistance and insistence from the Girls Not Brides US chapter, Stephanie introduced her work to Capitol Hill.
On October 11, 2012 – the first International Day of the Girl Child, the United Nations inaugurated the exhibition of Too Young To Wed.
Dignitaries from around the world gathered at the UN, surrounded by photographs of child brides as young as five and pledged to do whatever it took to end child marriage. The exhibition of Too Young To Wed at the United Nations in 2012 showed photographs accompanied by the quotes of girls and has now travelled to 27 countries.
Stephanie has since written numerous articles to accompany her pictures of child brides around the world. Her New York Times piece on child brides in Guatemala that was funded by UNFPA was the most-read story for the first half of February 2015.
Stephanie says while she feels she is more of a mainstream news journalist on other issues, she’s an open advocate when it comes to women’s and girls’ rights, aiming to speak and document child marriages in a way that defends the communities in general.
How can the media help to stop child marriage? UNICEF report: Ending Child marriage, Niger has the highest overall prevalence of child marriage in the world, while Bangladesh has the highest rate of marriage involving girls under age 15. South Asia is home to almost half (42 percent) of all child brides worldwide, while India alone accounts for one-third of the global total.
Plan International is an independent development and humanitarian organisation, which works in 71 countries across the world, in Africa, the Americas, and Asia to advance children’s rights and equality for girls.
Through the organisation’s Because I am a Girl campaign (the biggest campaign for girls’ rights), Plan International aims to drastically reduce and eventually eradicate child marriage statistics. Their work in Africa has led them to thousands of girls who are forced to marry because their mothers cannot afford to feed them or are worried that they will be ‘spoiled’ if they do not marry young.
One such girl is 13-year-old Mariama, who lives in Niger. In a 15-minute documentary, Mariama takes you through the horror of becoming a child bride. It begins with her mother explaining why she sold her daughter for accepting £122 (100,000 CFA).
Her mother, Ramatou says, although she is saddened that she has to sell her daughter, she thinks there is no other choice.
“I regret what’s happening, but you have to understand that I’m a widow. Even if I had no one else to feed, I would be lying awake at night thinking about how I’m going to feed myself the next day. I have to struggle to feed my children. So if an opportunity comes along…the only solution is to get her married. Firstly, she’s no longer my responsibility and secondly, you don’t run the risk of what will happen if she stays at home.”
Mariama only knew about her marriage when she came home from school one day. When she heard that she was to be married, she could not stop worrying. She would no longer go out with her friends because she believed everyone was talking about it. She begged her uncle, who helped arrange the marriage, to be patient and let her grow up.
Through the efforts of Plan International, a local judge stepped in to put a stop to Mariama’s marriage arrangement.
According to the Economist, across Africa child marriage stubbornly persists. Of the roughly 700m women living today who were married before they were 18, 125m are African. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that, on current trends, almost half the world’s child brides by 2050 will be African.
But there are African countries that are fighting to eradicate child marriage entirely by 2025. Ethiopia, once in the top 5 countries for child marriage has dropped by a third in the last decade.
Ethiopia’s weapon of choice? Education. More than a third of the country’s girls enrol in secondary school. When girls are educated and empowered, they can better persuade their families to delay or cancel engagements and instead focus on acquiring skills that will help support their families.
The UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to Accelerate Action To End Child marriage (GPECM) was launched in 2016 in 12 of the most high-prevalence countries: Niger, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Mozambique, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Yemen, and Zambia.
The programme increases girls’ access to education and health-care services, as well as educating parents and communities on the consequences of child marriage. It also addresses the underlying conditions that sustain child marriage, advocating for laws and policies that protect girls’ rights while highlighting the importance of using data to inform such policies. The programme is supported by the Governments of Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the European Commission, as well as Zonta International.
Conclusion:
So, what is the media’s role in ending child marriage by 2030? Global awareness. In 2009, child marriage hit the front pages of all the major newspapers when Nujood Ali, a 10-year-old Yemini girl defied her father and refused to marry a man three times her age. The media outlets shouted it and people listened.
It is this type of tenacity in reporting gross abuse of human rights that will keep the important conversations going. A greater focus must be placed on global awareness and education as most parents believe they are doing the right thing by giving their daughters to older men very early.
The media must become a voice for the over 12,000 girls each day who must lay down dolls and pick up real babies. And it starts with hard-hitting investigative journalism and cleverly directed documentaries, but it continues with regular stories about victims until there is no more to write. It is the role of the media to set the agenda for society as “when issues are covered by the media as often as possible, the public would take them to be important”. The media must also inform and educate the people of their fundamental Human Rights and suggest ways and means by which they can solve their problems and thus empower people to protect their rights.
Finally, the media must hold lawmakers and decision-makers accountable for fulfilling their responsibility to protect and uphold the public’s welfare.
