Early Child Marriage in Pakistan

According to recent reports, 24 per cent of girls married under the age of 18 worldwide last year were from rural Pakistan, whereas 18 per cent were from the country’s urban areas. The issue of child marriage raises several health concerns for young girls, some of which include pregnancy complications, health risks for babies born to young mothers and the risk of death. The reports said that girls pregnant under the age of 15 have a five times greater chance of dying compared with girls pregnant in their 20s. In Pakistan, there are various causes of early or child marriages. The most amongst those causes are: extremely weak legislation; lack of implementation of the existing laws; children are treated commodities/slaves; tribal and feudal structure of society; lack of awareness in the public about harmful effect of child marriages; extreme poverty; internal trafficking; and lack of will in the government. Another important cause of the child marriage is ineffective and non-responsive birth registration system. The birth registration for children, especially girls is never prioritized, which gives room for manipulation of the age of the child/girls at the time of marriage. In addition, there are no central, independent and strong child rights bodies that could monitor child rights violations including the issue of child marriages. Psychological impact on the girls when they enter into such relationships they are young the education and background and hostility of relationships and environment like dispute settlement further adds to their miseries. Limited choices and bodily control Awareness about reproductive rights and information of contraceptives is often lacking, which results in teenage pregnancies, and large family size. Thus they are unable to break the poverty cycle as large family size prohibits them from educating their children. While the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 says that the police cannot intervene directly in underage marriage, implying that Sharia law is to be consulted, the government needs to intervene. Child marriage should be prohibited and the legal age of marriage should be raised from 16 to 18. Pakistan is signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Children which defines child marriage below the age of 18; yet, the country allows marriages at age 16. Girls’ education has been promoted by the federal and provincial governments as well as by the CSOs including media. Pakistan’s National Education Policy prepared under the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals greatly focusing on eliminating gender disparity in education and encouraging families to send their girls to schools. Although the federal and provincial government has taken many positive measures in this regard and Governments have initiated campaigns for enhancement of literacy specially for promotion of primary education for girls in rural areas but also there is need to work a lot on it and the civil society also needs to work towards eradicating certain false assumptions in our culture, such as that religion sanctions child marriage.