MY TAKE
SHOCKING! THERE ARE CHILD BRIDES EVEN HERE IN CANADA
Image credit: AMISH THAKKAR on Unsplash.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
If contemporary desi lit is reflective of current social trends, then girls are delaying getting married in favour of pursuing academic and career goals.
In Sonia Lalli’s Serena Singh Flips The Script and Sara Desai’s The Dating Plan, Serena Singh and Daisy Patel are in their mid-30s and late-20s respectively. Both are single. Out of choice. They do find true love in the end but that’s another story.
Anecdotally, too, it would appear that South Asian girls are in no hurry to get married. So an article Hindustan Times dated January 12, 2021 came as a surprise.
Thousands of girls in Canada have been married before turning 18, warning that a rise in unofficial child marriages could make the practice harder to prevent and call into question the country's global leadership.
Thousands of girls? The article quoted Alissa Koski, co-author of a study conducted at McGill University, which found that more than 3,600 marriage certificates were issued to under-18s – mainly girls married to men – in Canada between 2000 and 2018.
Yet that number is just the tip of the iceberg with common-law unions becoming common.
The following is an edited excerpt from the McGill report:
At least 2,300 common-law partnerships - defined legally as relationships where a couple has lived together for at least a year - involved children under 18 as of 2016.
The findings contrast with Canada's positioning as a global leader in the United Nations-backed drive to end child marriage worldwide by 2030.
“Our results show that Canada has its own work to do to achieve its commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (on ending child marriage),” the university professor said. “All the while it is advocating for an end to child marriage elsewhere, the practice remains legal and ongoing across Canada.”
The country committed at least $80 million (USD62.5 million) to tackle child marriage worldwide from 2011 to 2016 and has led or supported several UN resolutions on the issue in recent years, according to Girls Not Brides, a global campaign group.
Canadian law permits children to marry from the age of 16 with parental consent or a court order... informal unions could be more harmful than formal marriage as they offered less social, legal and economic protection.
In my head, child marriages belong to another era, another place. I associate them with Rajshri Productions’ syrupy Balika Badhu (Child Bride) in 1976. Another movie based on the same book by Bimal Kar was released in 1967. Both were, even then, seen as reflective of a practice that was old and on its way out if not altogether gone. After all, India banned child marriages in 1929. Back then, the legal minimum age of marriage was set at 14 for girls and 18 for boys. Today, in India, the legal age for marriage is 18 for girls and 21 for men, but like in Canada, girls aged 16 or 17 can marry with the consent of a parent or guardian.
We live in our safe little cocoons, blissfully unaware of cruel practices that continue to flourish under our very nose.
But it would be wrong to conclude that the situation in Canada parallels that in the countries we come from. Because there, it’s the mostly the parents or guardians who bundle up and marry off young girls. Here, the young girls might be choosing this for themselves. And therein lies an opportunity. They can be educated on the potential harm of child marriages. They can be educated about their rights.
According to the article, girls who marry young are often pulled out of school and are at higher risk of marital rape, domestic abuse and pregnancy complications, activists have said. These are not even girls who are marrying young, I think, these are children.
And unbidden, an image surfaces in my mind. Of a sarvajanik vivah or communal wedding organized by the late India politician Amar Singh several years ago. To mark his 50 birthday, he paid for the weddings of fifty couples from disadvantaged backgrounds. A great idea, one might think, as it allowed couples to marry without the crippling burden of costs associated with Indian weddings. Indian movie star Amitabh Bachchan was present on the occasion, and seen blessing the young couples, wishing them happy married lives. But just how young at least some of them were became clear when a reporter asked the girls their age. Draped in similar red-and-gold dupattas that concealed their faces, one mumbled shyly that she didn’t know. Another said she was 18, but when she lifted the veil, she looked more like a child of 10 or 11. Just a little girl.
It was a ghastly spectacle, played out for political opportunism. Bachchan, who has a massive following, could have refused to attend. Better still, he could have used the occasion to “out” people who were encouraging this. There are temples devoted to the man, for Pete’s sake. Imagine the power he wields. If he had said child marriages were wrong, he’d have been heard.
He chose, instead, to play the benign patriarch.
Just another day, just another act.
Worldwide, an estimated 12 million girls are married every year before the age of 18 – nearly one girl every three seconds.
UN experts have predicted the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to an extra 13 million child marriages over the next decade.
Meanwhile we are busy watching Balika Badhu 2.0 on streaming platforms – making Balika Vadhu (same idea, different story) one of the most popular Indian television shows.