Transcript

Host: This is “On The Line,” and I’m Eric Felten.

The U.S. State Department has found child marriage to be a concern in some sixty countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia. According to some non-governmental organizations, nearly half the girls of the Amhara region of Ethiopia are married by the time they’re fourteen years old. The practice continues even where it is against the law.

It is estimated that more than half of the girls in Afghanistan are married before they reach sixteen, the legal age of marriage there. Advocates for the rights of women and children say that child marriage is a threat to the physical, mental, and emotional health of girls. They say child marriage keeps girls from pursuing education and takes from them the fundamental life decision about who to marry and when.

I spoke recently about this issue with congresswoman Betty McCollum. She has introduced legislation that would make the elimination of child marriage a foreign-policy goal of the U.S.

Host: Congresswoman McCollum, thank you for joining us today. We’re here to talk about the problem of child marriage. And maybe we could start by just understanding what exactly child marriage is. At what age do women have the ability to choose for themselves who and when to marry?

McCollum: I think in most cultures and countries, we determine adulthood right around the age of 18, the age of maturity here in the United States and pretty much throughout the world, as having the life skills and experience to really, fully be able to make choices of free will that you know what the consequences are. So, I’m going to use eighteen as an age that I think you’ll find most consensus that you have crossed the bridge from childhood to adulthood.

Host: So, how big a problem is marriage of women, girls, under eighteen, and where is it mostly a problem?

McCollum: It’s mostly a problem in the sub-Saharan region. We find it a problem to be in parts of the Middle East, especially the very rural, very remote parts of the Middle East. And Asia and Africa also -- the southern part of Africa -- also experiences child marriage. I’ve been to Ethiopia, where the government’s trying to tackle the issue. They’ve done a fairly good job in giving the message out, “We need to keep our girls in school. We need to keep them healthy by delaying marriage in Addis. But as soon as you start moving away from the capital area and getting more remote regions, it becomes a challenge, even for countries who are aggressively working on doing something on the issue of child marriage. But today, just today, twenty-five thousand girls under the age of eighteen will be placed in a position where they’re not making a choice that’s in their best interest. They’re being forced into marriage.

Host: And why should this be a concern? What are the consequences of girls getting married?

McCollum: It’s a human-rights concern on the face of young girls, children, being forced into having sex. I mean that’s a human-rights issue. It’s forcible rape. It’s an issue for the young girls for their health. Women will tell you that rape is a violent act. Can you imagine being a young girl, ten, eleven, twelve, being forcibly raped? This puts that young person at great risk for a whole host of health problems, both physical and mental. But then there’s also the risk of pregnancy that comes along with that. And when children are having children, it’s not healthy for anyone. And a lot of these young girls who are under the age of fifteen who find themselves pregnant, they don’t survive that pregnancy themselves. Even if they’re a little older, they’re going to have great complications. And the child that they have is less likely to be able to survive. So, it’s a no-win situation for anyone.

Host: Where’s the problem, one, of there not being laws and there not being governments trying to make an effort against it? And where is the problem that the governments aren’t really having an impact in the rural areas that you’ve mentioned.

McCollum: I think if we were to bring most of the ambassadors in from the countries that are on the top twenty-five list of countries that we know where child marriage is rampant, they’ll all say that they’re working on something. And I want to take that to heart because I think most people who are really involved in this issue, have any kind of education, experience, meet any of these young women who are suffering from fistula due to prolonged childbirth at a young age, girls not in school, seeing a ten-year-old being wed to somebody who’s in their forties, fifties, or sixties -- I mean, that tears at the heart of most people of, “This doesn’t feel right.” The challenge for many of these countries is that it’s a tradition, a tradition which; it is time for it to go. All traditions should be serving to help the health of their population. We shouldn’t encourage traditions that hurt individuals. That’s not a healthy tradition. Traditions, when I think of them, are things that make someone’s life better, create opportunity. But the bigger underlying problem of this is poverty. And the United States and other countries, when we’re trying to do something to help countries reach their millennium-development goals to eradicate extreme poverty, we come right up against child marriage. That’s, I believe, one of the reasons why the U.N. and countries that are working to promote and move forward with the millennium-development goals have girls going to school, all children attending schools and receiving an education as one of their primary goals. Because as soon as a child, a girl child, finds herself married, school stops. So, if we want to alleviate poverty, if we want to do something to provide better health care and access in countries, if we want to do something to help girls attend school, child marriage undermines every single one of those efforts. So, I really see the opportunity to work with countries in a positive way to say, “Hey, if we address the child marriage, we’ll help you achieve your millennium-development goals all the faster.”

Host: You talked about tradition and the issue of traditional societies. And then there’s also the issue of religion that comes into play. And not long ago in Niger, we had an effort from tribal leaders to push for tight limits on marriage age and trying to reduce child marriage, but they ran up against religious leaders, Muslim clerics, who didn’t want those changes. How does that play out, and what role is there for Western countries in trying to urge people to make changes to practices that they may see as religious practices?

McCollum: I think we need to be careful when we talk about religious practices not to single out any one faith group because as you pointed out, there are maybe some within the Muslim faith in very remote, very rural areas who haven’t seen how changing and delaying marriage will make the girl healthier -- she’ll be a healthier adult woman -- how that community will be healthier and stronger. This is not just a challenge for the Muslim faith. This is also a challenge for the Christian faith. In Ethiopia, when I was there, we were talking with some of the priests, people who are very high up in the Coptic church. And they said, “Look, we know that we will be doing good things for God’s children by delaying child marriage, but we’re having a hard time reaching some of our priests in the outlying areas. So, this isn’t Protestant, Hindu, Catholic, Coptic, Muslim. This isn’t one faith challenge. This is a challenge of people of many, many faiths to come together and to figure out a way to work cooperatively for what’s in the best interest of God’s creation, humankind, especially young girls. But poverty in those areas is quite often an underlying factor. Also, you know, sometimes people of faith will say, “You know, it’s in the girls’ best interest to marry them off because that way their reputation’s protected. They have the protection of a man.

Host: The notion that if you’re married super young, before you reach puberty, that you get rid of the possibility of there being premarital sex.

McCollum: Right. But also in many of these areas, girls are at great risk walking back to and from school at great distances for being raped. And in many of these cultures and still in some Western societies, a young woman who is a victim of rape is a person who feels that their self-worth is somehow diminished. In countries where dowries are still practiced and the idea of entering the relationship “pure” even has more of a -- I hate to say this -- value, but girls are quite often treated as property in these exchanges. With HIV/AIDS, it’s like, “My daughter’s not going to give you AIDS, and if I marry her off even younger, I can guarantee you she hasn’t been sexually active.” So, there’s a lot of things going on around here, but I do believe that people of...goodwill can come together and say, “What do we do to keep girls in school? What do we do to improve the reduction of poverty in your community?” It’s all going to boil down to education, keeping girls in school, and making sure that young girls don’t find themselves being married and being pregnant before they’re eighteen, before their bodies can handle it because that doesn’t contribute to the well-being of themselves, their families, or their community.

Host: We only have a couple of minutes left. But let’s look at the bill that you have sponsored in the U.S. Congress. And one of the key aspects of that is it calls for the U.S. government to develop a strategy for combating child marriage. What do you think that strategy would look like, and how does the U.S. go about trying to encourage change without appearing to be sort of heavy-handed and coming from the outside and interfering in local customs and practices?

McCollum: Almost every nation, every ambassador, every political leader you talk to from around the world has agreed with the U.N., the United Nations, in saying, “We need to stop this practice of young girls not being able to finish school, young girls not being able to reach their full potential, women being able to make a choice, as a human-rights issue, as to who they’re going to enter in marriage with.” That’s an underlying, fundamental agreement that all nations have. So, we need to approach it working on that principle. But the strategy of preventing child marriage is the strategy of helping countries, communities, and families lift themselves out of poverty by keeping girls in school and by making sure that we talk about human rights in a way that also talks about people’s right to being able to protect their bodies, young girls being able to protect themselves best by not entering into marriage to keep their reproductive health -- prevention of fistula, HIV/AIDS, dying in childbirth, and making sure that they retain their right to their health care, which most often can be accomplished by delaying marriage in many of these areas. So, they’re all integrated. But quite often what we don’t do is we’ll say, “Okay, we’re going to do HIV/AIDS prevention. We’re going to do malaria prevention. We’re going to come in and do an economic-development group. We’re going to develop more schools.” Underlying in that is how does that affect the children in the community? So, each and every one of these opportunities gives us a chance to engage in a positive dialogue with children, with parents, with community leaders about how do you achieve a healthy family, a healthy community, and a healthy nation? And child marriage and the prevention of that is underlying in them being able to achieve those goals.

Host: Congresswoman Betty McCollum, thank you so much for joining us today.

McCollum: You’re welcome. Thank you, Eric.

Host: Joining me now in our studio to talk about child marriage and how much impact the U.S. might have on this issue are Farhana Ali, a policy analyst at RAND, and the director of Population and Social Transitions at the International Center for Research on Women, Margaret Greene. Welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Margaret Greene, the last thing I was talking about with congresswoman Betty McCollum was this issue of how much can the U.S., even if it becomes a key issue of U.S. foreign policy. How much impact can U.S. policy have on a practice of marriage in rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa?

Greene: I think in the last year or so, we’ve been faced with two enormous opportunities that we need to respond to to make a difference in this area. The first is the legislation that congresswoman McCollum has been supporting that would make the United States -- that would require foreign-assistance spending to respond to the issue of child marriage in other countries, and I think another very important opportunity at this time is the PEPFAR reauthorization.

Host: What is PEPFAR?

Greene: It’s the President’s Emergency Plan For Aids Relief, and it’s the largest national commitment to addressing HIV in foreign assistance that the world has seen, and I think in the HIV area, people have recognized the significance of gender inequality in contributing to the spread of HIV among young women in particular, but among young people more broadly and adult women as well. And so there’s an opportunity to put our money where our mouth is. Everybody agrees internationally that gender inequality is an important issue to address and that it is expressed in child marriage among other places, but here we have some chances, really, to spend money and make a difference.

Host: Farhana Ali, what do you think, in terms of money being spent, what kind of a difference can that make?

Ali: I think it’s an important piece of legislation that’s being proposed at this time. Although I truly believe that the real onus falls on the world leaders [of the places] in which these crimes are being committed against women. If we look at various Muslim countries, for example, across the Middle East and South Asia, there is legislation already in place. Let’s take a country like Pakistan, for example. There is a 1929 Child-Marriage restraint act. Unfortunately, though, while that legislation is in place, there’s no enforcement mechanism. So what the United States can do is to work with world leaders, but also beyond that to look at ways to work with communities. So the money that’s being currently spent now on -- that’s being given to these world leaders actually needs to trickle down to the community level, and what I mean by that, because if you look at the communities, the religious leaders, for example, a lot of these crimes against women occur in societies that are highly patriarchal, where feudalism exists, where there’s social acceptance of violence against women, and so there is a dire need now to work with the centers of power, the centers of influence, which are religious community leaders.

Host: Margaret Greene, how does that money get used in a way that makes a difference at the local level?

Greene: Our foreign assistance contributes to -- it contributes to health systems, it contributes to education systems, and so on, and at the local level, the money would be used for opening a special girls school, for example, ensuring that female teachers are there so that girls don’t drop out because their parents are concerned about their -- the propriety of having them study with male teachers, ensuring that it’s safe for girls to get to school. I think there are a lot of structures in place in countries that could be more responsive to the inequalities that girls face. I think another area in which this kind of investment would make a huge difference is in the health arena. Really, when it comes down to it, adolescent girls are invisible. They are a very large fraction of the world’s population, and yet, if you calculated the proportion of money that’s spent on services in a given country, the amount that goes to girls is infinitesimal. And yet, these are the girls who, through, when they’re married early, are expected to form families, raise healthy children, educate their children, and so on.

Host: Farhana Ali, one of the things that congresswoman McCollum made a point of saying was that this was not a practice limited to one particular religion, and yet we do see that where the practice is prevalent, local religious leaders of various faiths do seem to approve of it, encourage it. How does one address an issue that has the support of local religious leaders?

Ali: Unfortunately, this practice of child marriage is done in the name of religion. It’s justified in the name of religion, and I will just speak to the Muslim world because it’s where I have primarily focused my research on. If you look across South Asian countries, for example, let’s take Afghanistan and Pakistan, where you have tribal structures and you have feudal structures, you also have Islam that’s being misappropriated or misused so that this kind action or child marriage is being legitimated in the name of religion, I would call it, in very simple terms, rethinking Islam. In other words, there needs to be a push by the government to educate those religious leaders who are doing this in the name of religion because unless you do that, this practice, which is socially acceptable at the community level, will continue. It is, unfortunately, a universal problem with no universal solution.

Host: Margaret Greene, we have a little less than a minute left. How does this issue of addressing the social acceptability of it, how does one go about trying to change the societal norms that underpin this behavior?

Greene: Nobody wants to have a girl in poor health. Nobody wants somebody who does not know how to use local institutions or access existing resources. I think it’s very much a matter of raising awareness in communities about the repercussions of child marriage, that when girls are withdrawn early from school that that is not good for them or for their children, that, very often, the conditions that they face within marriage are much more abusive or difficult for them as a result of very early marriage and large age differences between them and their perhaps sexually more experienced partners who may expose them to the risk of disease. I think it’s really a matter of raising awareness. Everybody wants to do well by girls.

Host: Afraid that’s going to have to be the last word for today. We’re out of time. But I’d like to thank my guests: Farhana Ali, a policy analyst at RAND and director of the Population and Social Transitions at the International Center for Research on Women, Margaret Greene. Before we go, I’d like to invite you to send us your questions or comments. You can reach us through our website at www.voanews.com/ontheline. For “On the Line,” I’m Eric Felten.