The normality of child marriage

Lucy.

Two years ago one of my friends and I made a project in school in a course called theory of knowledge. The question we posed was: to what extent does culture define our sense of what is normal? We had decided to focus on child marriage. Social norms are explicit and implicit rules specifying what behavior, values, beliefs and attitudes are acceptable within a society or group, they are neither static nor universal. Which means that they change over time and vary in different cultures, social classes and social groups.  Into the presentation we integrated the story of Praveen. One of her neighbors, fifteen years old Maryam, was fortunate enough to have parents that did not force her to marry while she was still a child, but let her fulfill her dream of becoming a software engineer. Maryam from Pakistan participated in the annual session of the Commission on the Status of Women held in the UN in New York in 2012. There she told the story of twelve years old Praveen.  One of the first things Praveen did when she entered her husband’s house was to look for toys. Then she ate the tomatoes her mother-in-law had given her to cook. After that she was quickly sent back to her father. Maryam explained than now “Praveen’s weeping all day. She’s too young to comprehend the meaning of marriage and divorce but she’s old enough to understand that her life is ruined”. Close to 10 million girls worldwide like Praveen are forced to marry older men when they are still only children.

Lucy, one of the girls I talked to at the school in Tharaka, said that they needed better dormitories. One of the reasons they need dormitories at all is that most of the children live far away from the school, so, if they lived at home, they would have to walk long distances to and from school. At which point it would most likely be dark. After dark, and in truth also during the day, some of the problems that children can face are snakes, wild animals and rape. In the second school I visited there was no children because of the holidays, but I got to see their dormitories. The toilet was maybe ten meters away. Even at that short distance I was told that rape might take place, maybe it already has. If the perpetrator agrees to marry their victim it is no longer seen as abuse. The young girls want to get married because they think that it is a ticket straight out of poverty, but it hardly ever is.  They will end up with the lives of their mothers and their mothers before that. In our presentation we found that culture and heritage shapes or defines our sense of what is normal to a great extent, but, as I said, social norms can change over time. The acceptance of child marriage in many countries are changing with the help of girls like Maryam, but it needs to change faster. All the girls told me that they did not plan to marry before high school, but they would have said that even if they were.