Awesta Telyar Azada
Neda cries every time her child cries.
She was only fourteen when her family decided to marry her to a man twice her age in exchange for money. After a year she gave birth to a little boy. They named him Hashem.
Today the baby is five weeks old, but Neda- herself a child- doesn’t even know how to hold him properly. She is also struggling with feeding him and changing his diapers. She doesn’t want to breastfeed him often as her nipples are sore and painful. She has a hard time finding a balance between taking care of her child and keeping herself clean and healthy. This leaves both the mother and child with poor hygiene.
Neda looks weak and exhausted. The dark circles around her eyes are testimony to sleepless nights and the pain she is going through day and night. She doesn’t know how to cope with her situation and her crying baby.
“Crying is the only thing that gives me a little comfort,” Neda says.
Neda’s story is that of many other women and girls in Afghanistan. Cultural practices such as the bride price (selling girls in marriage) or giving girls in Baad (the tradition of marrying girls to settle animosity between families and tribes), or even engagements before birth are common and contribute to the high prevalence of child and forced marriage in Afghan society.
A reality that is often ignored by families arranging forced and early marriages is that the problems don’t end with the wedding ceremony. In fact a forced marriage is the beginning of long-term trauma and pain for many women and girls.
Many girls suffer physical harm as their bodies are often not developed enough for childbirth. Research shows that girls aged 15-19 are more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than older ones. Their children are also 50% more likely to die than babies born to women who are at least 20 years old.
Apart from the health risks, early marriage can also cause girls to drop out of school (if they were in school in the first place) which impacts future employment opportunities and their independence. In Afghanistan, where married girls and women aren’t allowed to attend high school with unmarried ones, they are left with few options. Married girls are often disempowered, dependent on their husbands for financial support and deprived of their fundamental rights to health, education and safety.
The negative impact does not ends here. Being a wife and a mother while being a child at the same time causes irreparable damage to girls’ mental health. Often forced to engage in intimacy with husbands they didn’t choose, girls can suffer from psychological trauma that prevents them from living healthy lives or raising healthy children. This “failure” to properly take care of children often brings the status of the young wife even lower in the family making her more likely to be abused by their husbands and/or in-laws. Child marriages lead to unhealthy women and mothers, unhealthy marriages, unhealthy children and in general unhealthy societies.
The reality is that people are unaware of the consequences of child and forced marriages. They see its negative impact on a daily basis. The question is this: Why do child and forced marriages continue to happen and how can we stop them?
In Afghanistan, in addition to deeply rooted patriarchal cultural practices, poverty, war, lack of education, and insecurity also add to this issue. More than three decades of war has kept people away from education and prevented many women from knowing about their human rights and standing up for it. More than 85% of adult Afghan women are illiterate so it is probably no surprise that don’t know about their rights according to the law.
Even if women are aware of their rights according to the law, access to justice for women in Afghanistan is still mostly a dream. With most cases of gender-based violence facing no prosecution at all, women are not likely to seek justice.
The law itself also has to change. Afghanistan is one of a small handful of countries where the age of marriage for boys and girls is different and girls under 18 are legally allowed to be married. According to the Child Rights Convention, anyone under 18 is a child, and that includes girls. It is time Afghanistan ended this double standard and protected girls’ rights. This is something organizations like the Human Rights Watch have advocated for, for many years.
Although there has been some progress for women and girls rights since the end of the Taliban regime in 2001, forced and early marriages are among the most urgent and prevalent problems we continue to face. In fact, statistics from the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission show that anywhere between 60-80% of marriages in the country are forced and nearly 60% of girls are married before they reach the age of sixteen.
It is important to remember that child marriage is a global problem. According to the rights organization Girls Not Brides, every year, 15 million girls are married before they reach the age of eighteen. That means every two seconds one underage girl is married. Behind these statistics are real girls like Neda and to improve their lives and prevent this injustice from happening, we all need to take action.
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Read this piece in Pashtu.