This week’s blog is on child marriage in South Sudan in
Africa. Most young women are victims of child marriage. According to government
statistics for South Sudan girls, roughly about half of them marry between ages
fifteen and nineteen with some of them marrying at age twelve. This saddens me because
marriage should be a woman’s choice and one that is freely given without fear
of force. One thing that startles me is that child marriages happen in every
region of the globe.
The government does not give girls that much protection when
it comes to free choice and marriage. Women do try to resist a forced marriage
or leave marriages of abuse but with little success. Their culture looks like
they try to marry off their women early to avoid having children out of wedlock.
Most of those accusations of premarital sex are wrong. Girls in Sudan told
Human Rights Watch that they were forced to marry to receive a large dowry or
because of suspicion of premarital sex.
Girls suffer physical and verbal abuse and sometimes murder
for not going through with a marriage. Oftentimes a girl will not like a man
but that man rapes her and she has to stay with that man. I think it is a
cultural factor. An early marriage interrupts a girl’s dreams of better education.
It also causes reproductive health problems and girls die earlier from
childbearing because their bodies are not fully developed yet. Human Rights
Watch recommended that South Sudan set the marriage age limit at age eighteen.
Human Rights Watch called on the government to adopt a number of reforms to
better protect women from those marriages.
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