Alanna Armitage and Bjorn Andersson, regional directors of the United Nations Population Fund in the Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Asia Pacific region have decided to put an end to practised child marriage. The rate of this phenomenon in Eastern Europe is estimated at about 12% and is common in Georgia, Turkey and Albania.
Despite the existing law of legislative framework on child marriages, official data from 2017 shows that 16.9% of marriages happened between and adult and a female under the age of 19; the same statistics show that only 0.5% of this involves the opposite gender of the same age. Child marriage cases are much higher in Roma communities, as the UN states, but due to lack of accurate data available and unregistered marriages, the actual number is unknown.
What happens when children get married at an early age are the following:
- becoming school dropouts;
- early pregnancy and parenthood;
- lack of autonomy;
- (most likely) losing the ability of decision-making in the household.
The idea of child marriage is most likely to be linked to a poor family and social backgrounds, also, the ”child’s honour” is also a key reason why the ”tradition” is still being forced in certain communities, Unicef says. Knowledge about sexual and reproductive health care is lacking, boys are biased over girls, which leads to gender inequality; about 140 million girls are ”missing” globally, UNFPA reports.
Even though some legislation has been passed, society itself has to do more in order to annihilate the issue. Child marriage can neither be accepted as an excuse for traditional nor cultural practice, as it violates human rights.
“The low value of girls and women is what underpins harmful practices globally…We must stop treating girls and women like commodities to be traded, or objects to be controlled, and afford them the same rights and opportunities as boys and men,” wrote Armitage and Andersson.