UNITED NATIONS POPULATION FUND
Yemeni authorities presented to the press an eight year old girl, claiming it was Rawan, to disprove reports that she had died after being raped by her husband. PHOTO/AFP/Getty/The Daily Beast
In its annual State of the World Population for 2013, the UN Population Fund found that every day, roughly 20,000 girls below the age of 18, most of them in the developing world, give birth and that 90 per cent of these occur within a union or a marriage. Girls under the age of 15 account for more than a quarter – about 2m of 7.3m annually – of new adolescent mothers and this number could rise to more than 3m by 2030.
Per Clarisse, 17, Chad:
“I was 14… My mom and her sisters began to prepare food, and my dad asked my brothers, sisters and me to wear our best clothes because we were about to have a party. Because I didn’t know what was going on, I celebrated like everyone else. It was that day I learned that it was my wedding and that I had to join my husband. I tried to escape but was caught. So I found myself with a husband three times older than me…. This marriage was supposed to save me from debauchery. School was over, just like that. Ten months later, I found myself with a baby in my arms. One day I decided to run away, but I agreed to come back to my husband if he would let me go back to school. I returned to school, have three children and am in seventh grade.”
“In every region of the world, impoverished, poorly educated and rural girls are more likely to become pregnant than their wealthier, more urban and more educated counterparts,” the UNFPA concluded in its report, ‘Motherhood in Childhood’. Countries’ efforts to address adolescent pregnancy have failed to address the underlying causes including gender inequality, poverty, sexual violence and coercion, child marriage, social pressures and stereotypes about adolescent girls. About 70,000 deaths a year in the developing world are attributed to causes stemming from pregnancy and child birth.
The study noted that in some countries, the prevalence of very young motherhood is striking; one girl in 10 has a child before the age of 15 in Bangladesh, Chad, Guinea, Mali, Mozambique and Niger, countries where child marriage is common. In Bangladesh, Chad and Niger, more than one in three girls is married before her 15th birthday.
Per Komal, 18, India, “I was 16 and never missed a day of school. I liked studying so much, I would much rather spend time with my books than watch TV! I dreamt of going to college and then getting a good job so that I could take my parents away from the dingy house we lived in.
Then one day, I was told that I had to leave it all, as my parents bartered me for a girl my elder brother was to marry. Such exchange marriages are called atta-satta in my community. I was sad and angry. I pleaded with my mother, but my father had made up his mind.
My only hope was that my husband would let me complete my studies. But he got me pregnant even before I turned 17. Since then, I have hardly ever been allowed to step out of the house. Everyone goes out shopping and for movies and neighbourhood functions, but not me.
Sometimes, when the others are not at home, I read my old school books, and hold my baby and cry. She is such an adorable little girl, but I am blamed for not having a son.
But things are gradually changing. Hopefully, customs like atta-satta and child marriage will be totally gone by the time my daughter grows up, and she will get to complete her education and marry only when she wants to.”
United Nations Population Fund for more