Pushpa went out for motorcycle rides with her boyfriend, and didn’t think all that much of taking gifts from him. But her parents were unhappy she was running around with a boy, and forced them to marry because they didn’t want her to be labeled as promiscuous. She was only 14 then, and had to stop schooling.

“We were friends. We’d never had sex … but he would take me out on his motorcycle after school and buy me presents. My parents heard about our friendship and they were very angry as they thought I had behaved ‘badly.’ They forced us to get married. I didn’t want to get married. I wanted to live at home with my brother and sisters,” says Pushpa who is now 18 and pregnant with her second child.

By the time she was 16, she had suffered a miscarriage and given birth to her daughter.

The marriage was never a happy one, says Pushpa. Her 28-year-old husband was angry and resentful at being forced to marry her and hardly talked to her. There was no physical abuse but he “wasn’t very nice” to her anymore.

“He goes out all the time, gets drunk and then comes home and demands that I have sex with him. He gets angry each time I talk about going back to school,” she recounts.

“I miss my friends. Now, I stay at home and cook and clean, look after my daughter. I live with my husband’s parents and his sisters but I have no friends. They (his sisters) go to school and go out with friends but I … don’t do anything,” says Pushpa, who now lives in Jinjang, Kuala Lumpur, after her village in Petaling Jaya was torn down for the development of condominiums.

Because she was under the legal age of marriage at the time, Pushpa’s marriage wasn’t registered: the couple merely had a religious ceremony to mark their union.

Worldwide, the calls for banning child marriages have never rang louder. For the first time ever, the United Nations this year declared Oct. 11 a day to mark the International Day of The Girl Child, affirming their stance against any form of violation against the rights of girls.

For its inaugural celebration, the focus is on child marriages with the theme: My life, My right, End child marriage.

Worldwide statistics show that though child marriages affect both genders, the victims are primarily girls who suffer the grave consequences of an early marriage: Most drop out of school, suffer high incidence of abuse and, if they get pregnant early face many life-threatening health issues, too. Studies have shown that girls under 15 are five times as likely to die in childbirth.

U.N. statistics show that globally, as many as 10 millions girls are forcibly married before they turn 18 ― amounting to 25,000 girls every single day.

Child marriages are shockingly prevalent in Malaysia where the legal age of marriage for non-Muslims is 18. However, marriages are allowed for those between 16 and 18 with written consent from the chief minister. For Muslims, the legal age of marriage for males is 18 and females, 16. With the permission of the Syariah Court, however, Muslims can marry at any age.

Some couples, like Pushpa and her husband, are married according to customary rites, and do not register their marriages.

There are two kinds of child marriages in Malaysia: marriage between an underage boy and girl, and marriage between a girl and an older man.

For a long time, child marriage was thought to be a non-issue in Malaysia. However, recent cases highlighted in the media have raised concern. In October 2010, 14-year-old Siti Maryam Mahmod wedded 23-year-old teacher Abdul Manan Othman and the couple later participated in a mass wedding reception organized by the Federal Territory Islamic Affairs Department (Jawi).

Earlier the same year, there was public outcry over the marriage of two girls aged 10 and 11 to men in their 40s in Kelantan. The 11-year-old was found days later abandoned and in a state of shock.

Most recently, there was a YouTube video posting of Syafiq, a 16-year-old boy and his 14-year-old bride Yana. The video looked professionally shot and the wedding was festive. In the comments section, the response was positive, with many applauding Syafiq for acting “responsibly” by getting married.

According to Saira Shameem, the United Nations Populations Fund (UNFPA, Malaysia) program advisor, the issue of child marriages is significant in Malaysia and should be addressed immediately.

According to UNFPA, 1.4 percent of all married women in Malaysia in 2011 were aged between 15 and 19, which amounts to 82,000 girls.

“In an economically stable country like Malaysia where women are educated and employed in high-level jobs and where girls make up 60 percent of the students in tertiary education institutions, this should not be happening. But it does and our study reveals that many of these marriages happen under duress. Many of the subjects interviewed revealed that it wasn’t their choice to get married so young and that given a choice, they would get married when they were 20 or 21,” Saira says.

There are many reasons why child marriages happen ― for economic survival (young girls are seen as a burden and the family marries her off to both ease their burden and secure her future), to “protect” daughters from unwanted sexual attention and to ensure she does not have pre-marital sex, cultural norms derived from traditional practices and religious beliefs.

In Malaysia, the reasons often cited for marrying off young daughters is to ensure they do not get involved in illicit relationships, and to ease the family’s economic burden.

But whatever the reason, child marriages are deemed to be a violation of girls’ human rights.

In a message against child marriage on the Girls Not Brides website (a global partnership of over 180 organizations to stop child marriage), South African activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Desmond Tutu said, “Child marriage robs girls of their childhood, their basic rights to education, security and health. What I have realized is that these girls are invisible and voiceless, making them some of the most vulnerable, disempowered people on our planet. Let girls be girls, not brides.”

Tutu touches on one of the crucial impacts of the practice of child marriage: it robs children of their adolescence. Childhood is, after all, not for cooking, cleaning or having babies. It is for gaining an education and having friends.

Khatijah (not her real name) was forced to marry a widower when she was 15. “I came home from school one day, and my mother and my aunts told me that they had found a husband for me. He was much older than me but they said he was a good man and would take care of me. I didn’t understand what was happening and why I had to marry this man. Although I said I didn’t want to get married, they said I had to,” recounts the 16-year-old teenager from Pahang who wed less than a year ago.

Khatijah’s husband is a 36-year-old widower, a well-respected figure in his village who was looking for a new, young bride. “I don’t want to be pregnant. I don’t want to be married. I want to work and move to KL. Bencilah (I hate it),” says Khatijah who now looks after her two step-children, aged 7 and 9.

Child marriages often inevitably lead to early preganacies, the risks of which have been widely documented. Pregnancy-related deaths are the leading cause of mortality for 15- to 19-year-old girls worldwide. Mothers in this age group face a 20 to 200 percent greater chance of dying in pregnancy than women aged 20 to 24 while those under age 15 are five times as likely to die as women in their twenties.

“We are not allowed to drive until we are 17, to vote until we are 21. So how can girls get married, have sex and bear children at 16? or 15? What do they know about the responsibilities or implications of being married, let alone sex and getting pregnant. And then there are the health risks … why would we expose out children to such risks if the effects are so devastating?” says Suriani Kempe, Sisters in Islam’s Program Manager for Advocacy, Legal Services and Public Education.

By S. INDRAMALAR

(The Star)