Tales of Child Marriage
These are stories of two young girls I interviewed in my job as a journalist in Kenya. Names have been withheld to protect their identities.
“My father sat me down while I was 12-years-old, in class 6, and told me - ‘My daughter, you are now a grown up girl. You should stop going to school and join your peers who are going for circumcision, for you to get married, so that I can get cows in return, and be able to educate your brothers’. On our way to the circumciser, I escaped.”
“I was only 13-years-old and in class 7 when a man presented himself to my father for my hand in marriage. My father told me that I would get married to that man, claiming that there’s no need for girls to get an education. This man brought 10 cows and 17 goats.
When my father so the cows being brought into our compound, he immediately told me to quickly stand up and go with my in-laws, then he turned to them and told them-‘go with your wife, go with your wife, I repeat, go with your wife!’
They grabbed me and forced me out of the door. I tried screaming but no one bothered to help me. The old man had four wives — I was now the 5th wife.”
Research shows that poverty, gender inequalities, lack of access to education and harmful cultural practices such as female genital mutilation are some of the key drivers of child marriage. However these drivers may vary from one community to another.
Poor families may opt to give out the young girls out for marriage due to poverty, while in some communities, girls are not valued as boys, hence given out to marriage to ease the economic burden of raising them. Moreover, they are seen as a source of wealth attached to the dowry.
Low level of education which leads to low level of empowerment is also a driver of child marriage in some communities in Kenya.
Now, imagine this, if you don’t speak up for that girl now, not to be subjected to this vice, what kind of a generation will she bring up? All she’ll know is that once you’ve been cut, you get married as a child — and that’s what she’ll pass onto her children, and her children’s children.
And that’s why we need to speak up and say enough is enough, no other girl should become a statistic of child marriage, it should end in our generation.
Here’s one way of speaking up, by signing up for the #ItTakesUsAllKE to end violence against children!
https://www.wvi.org/signup/it-takes-us-all-end-violence-against-children
