My blood boiled when I heard the Council of Islamic Ideology’s denunciation of increasing the age that girls were married to 18 as being ‘unislamic’ and ‘blasphemous’. Why I had expected any rationality from them is beyond me. We all know that Ijtihad has ended in the Muslim world and we no longer try to understand our religion in the context of the times we live in. It matters not to them, that a girl’s puberty comes much earlier now than in the first century, due to a number of factors including the chemicals now used in the production of food. It certainly does not matter to them, that the life cycle of a woman is much longer now with average age of death now around 70, so she can marry later and still have children during her reproductive life before her death. And above all, it really does not matter to these insensitive men, that early child marriages are being done not on the basis of religion but in fact religion is being used to perpetuate social class differences. With rich old men marrying young poor girls, to settle feuds, debts and often obligations the father may have. They are allowing Islam to be used to keep the poor downtrodden while the wealthy have no such compulsions to destroy their daughters’ lives.
It is a reality that the poorer the family, the less educated the family and if it is living in a rural area it is more likely to marry its girls much earlier. In fact the poor family is likely to marry its daughter 5 years earlier as compared to a rich family in Pakistan. The earlier the girl gets married the more likely her life as described by Hobbes is ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ Young women, especially below the age of 18 are much more likely to suffer health complications and deaths during childbirth. One of the major reasons why women in earlier centuries had a much shorter life was death during childbirth. A recent report by Unicef, shows that 7 % of Pakistani children were married before the age of 15 and 24 percent married by 18. Islam gives both partners when entering marriage the right to say No—how many girls who are 7, 8, 9, even 15 understand what marriage means, never mind can say no!
Nonetheless, we need to go back to the drawing board again and find other ways of ensuring that young girls are empowered and able to lead healthy and full lives. We don’t need to get bogged down with the age 18. First of all conservatives and the religious right need to understand this is about the health and wealth of the Pakistani child, it is our agenda and not dismiss it by calling it a Western agenda. In the West there are many instances of countries that still have very low legal ages of marriages; Spain, in 2015, finally brought a law to increase the age of marriage from 14 to 16 and in the USA, the state of Massachusetts still legally allows girls as young as 12 to get married in ‘exceptional circumstances’ with a judge’s consent. Of course in general, these are the legal ages written in their laws and mostly a remnant of the past, very few children are actually getting married at these ages. Furthermore, to the extent these laws still exist it does not affect the people living in those societies the way it does in Pakistan; where a feudal man or father can treat his daughter or girls in the area as chattels. The industrialization process in the west alongside growing civic movements helped to get greater rights for the labour class, women and children. One essential part of this evolution of rights was the introduction of comprehensive educational systems. Education with the passage of time created awareness and increased economic opportunities for women, leading them to marry later through choice and not because it was mandated by governments.
In Pakistan, under the Child Marriage Restraint Bill 1929, the current legal age of marriage for girls is 16. The most effective way to ensure that girls marry later is to ensure free education for all children as per their constitutional right up to age of 16. Government needs to enforce mandatory schooling for all children. Pursuing education is part of a positive cycle, which will also help to improve health and population goals. Initially targeting education in those districts, where many problematic socio-economic indicators exist, such as in Jacobabad and Matiari, where not only the prevalence of young marriages is very high, but they also rank very low on health and population indicators. All research shows that education delays the age of marriage for children. Even an illiterate family will marry their daughter one year later if she is given primary school education and this increases with the number of years spent in school. Alongside this national and regional media campaigns need to be run to create awareness of the relationship between early marriages and perpetuating poverty as well as creating health complications and mother and child deaths. The rural populace in particular needs to be targeted.
In Sindh, the provincial government passed an enlightening law in April 2014, but we need to evaluate it in light of this. Have we seen any improvement? Have the existing percentages gone down? How many criminal prosecutions have taken place? Or given the nature of the policing system has this only led to more greasing of hands. Laws are the means to an end and in this case the end is that these children can lead safe and happy lives.