IN POWERFUL COMPANY Taking on the Challenge to End Child Marriage with The Elders

Old palace of King Haile Selassie, now University of Addis Ababa

In the space of twelve hours I shared a drink with one ex President, had dinner with one ex Prime Minister, sat next to the only lady in the world to be both a minister and First Lady of two countries and greeted one Nobel Laureate. In the meeting I was attending, I had very august company. But I guess you need such fire-power if you have to start a global campaign to end one of the most persistent, shameful but extremely common forms of traditional practice that plagues large parts of the world. This traditional practice, which many choose to believe is a thing of the past, but is openly endorsed by political and religious leaders in India, is child- marriage. Sixty concerned persons from all over the world had gathered together at Addis Ababa for a meeting called by The Elders, to discuss ways of ending this regrettable practice. The four stalwarts Desmond Tutu, Gro Bruntland, Graca Machel and Mary Robinson represented the group The Elders, which had been brought together by Nelson Mandela on his 89^th birthday in 2007 to deal with pressing global issues. The Elders had now decided to put their considerable political and moral clout to take the issue of child marriage head on.

While I still consider my daughter of 19 years to be my baby, many fathers don’t hesitate to send their 15 year, or 12 year or even 10 year old daughters off to a stranger’s house in marriage. The meeting started with the screening of a documentary giving a grim and poignant portrayal of a child-bride’s travails and helplessness. It covered girls from Afghanistan, Yemen and also from India and they are also part of a story in the National Geographic . With the stage set The Elders provided the gathered group how they had earlier missed identifying this issue as important even when they had been tackling related issues like child rights and maternal mortality in their official capacties, and explained why they are working on it now. A recent study highlighted the chilling statistics that nearly one third of all 12 year olds are married in one region of Ethiopia and nearly half of all 18 year olds in India are married. The discussions showed how this one social injustice affected over 10 million girls every year, and if eliminated would influence six of the eight anti-poverty millennium development goals which all countries of the world were committed to.   

In India we can be proud that we have had a law against child marriage for over 80 years, we can also be ashamed that this law has hardly ever been used to stop child marriage. In states like Rajasthan thousands of child marriages take place on the auspicious occasion of “akha teej”. Everyone knows and looks the other way, even the police. The political and religious leaders come to bless the child bride. One study done by a group in Lucknow had come up with the remarkable finding that the law against child marriage was exclusively used by parents when they wanted their daughters to stop marrying a man of her own choice. They would fudge the records to show adult daughters as being under-age and charge their son-in-laws of both kidnapping and child-marriage. The well-known Bhanwari Devi case in Rajasthan ( filmed as Bawandar), recalls the ugly event in 1992, where a group of upper caste men raped a lower caste worker of a women’s development scheme for stopping a child marriage. The judicial system also failed her when the trial court acquitted the accused. Years later in 2005, a woman’s hand was chopped off in Madhya Pradesh for daring to interfere in the practice.    

Indian society has been resisting efforts to end child marriage for well over a hundred years. In the late nineteenth century, there were two cases one of Phulmonee Devi in Bengal who died of vaginal bleeding at age eleven and that of Rukhmabai in Maharashtra who was married at eleven and refused to go and live with her husband. Both these legal cases demanding raising age at marriage, were bitterly opposed by Hindu religious critics. The Indian law against child marriage ( Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929) could only come about because Rai Harbilas Sarda, the chief proponent of the Act realized the dangers of child marriage after his child bride died in pregnancy. The risk of maternal mortality is many times higher in young girls, but even today a significant proportion of 18year old girls are married and have children as well.

Old Palace of King Menelik II on Entoto Mountain

While India has a law which is flouted, we learnt in the meeting that some countries don’t even have laws around early marriage and even in advance nations like the US. In the US three states don’t have any minimum age, while in many others minors can marry with parental or court permission! We learnt that the problem in the US or in Europe is not as acute with the median age at marriage being quite high, despite weak laws. But in many African countries, just like in India, the law is no protection against child marriage. Studies have suggested that in South East Asia, this ugly phenomenon has disappeared in a couple of generations and education of the girl child was considered as the most important factor. The meeting ended with all of us agreeing to come together and highlight this issue at all levels. Hopefully with such energy and inspiration this practice will soon be challenged within our passive and accepting society.

Carrying one's shopping back from Mercato market

Having gone all the way to Addis Ababa it would have been a pity if I did engage in some tourism. For those interested in history or more precisely prehistory there was an excellent collection of fossils on human evolution in the local museum. The Merkato market reminded me of the old city bazaars like Chandni Chowk (Delhi), Burrabazar ( Kolkata) or Chowk-Aminabad ( Lucknow). The Ethiopians were very friendly and greeted us with a Namastey wherever we went. However my pleasant Ethiopian experience came to a crashing end when I was off loaded from the Ethiopian Airlines flight to Delhi. I had a confirmed ticket, I had checked in on time, I had a boarding pass, but still I was left behind. It is not surprising that it is a government enterprise, and I shared the same fate that many tourists must have faced with our very own Air India. I stoically spent the extra day in Addis in the true spirit of South-South solidarity.   

A short slideshow on the St George's Church 

THE ROMA: EUROPE’S BEST KEPT SECRET

Mr Pavon (middle) supervising the barbeque

This year I had occasion to participate in May Day celebrations in far away Romania with a group of  young Roma who have come together to form a social association and now want to work on health rights issues of the local Roma community. The setting was idyllic. We were in a wooded hollow of an artificial lake. We had a splendid barbeque picnic with pork chops, veal steaks and sausages, topped with home-made white and red wine. But we weren’t the only group having fun. Even though communism is history for over twenty years, May Day continues to be an occasion for the whole family to enjoy themselves in Romania. While we were enjoying our barbeque, a stream of visitors came down to enjoy a meal at the floating restaurant or to take a pleasure boat ride.

The lake and floating restaurant

Mr Pavon, the leader of the local Roma community was the master at the barbeque, and he has also been the inspiration behind the younger generation taking up their social cause. Many among this group are students, employed in the local municipality or engaged in business, but the situation of most of the Roma in Romania is far from satisfactory. Earlier in the morning Alfredo, (Mr Pavon’s son) and other members of the youth group, had shown us around what could be termed a Roma ghetto or in more familiar terms a slum. These two multi-storeyed buildings used to be workers quarters for a cement factory. But now the factory which had earlier employed 6000 people, needed just 300 employees and as a result unemployment is high in the community. Many of the unemployed are Roma. These buildings were abandoned by the factory, but now Roma squatters have occupied them. We were told over 100 families occupied each building. There was no running water, no plumbing, no sewage, and the electricity was stolen from the pole just like in India. However an ubiquitous dish antenna stuck out of nearly each ‘apartment’ confirming that TV is the new opium of the masses. There was a primary school close to this building but even though schooling is free, Roma children from these two building do not attend school. They are not even encouraged by the teachers because they are dirty and smelly. But the real reason could be that they are actually busy begging at the street lights or near the supermarket doorway.

Without running water but with dish TVs

Roma or gypsies as they were earlier called are the ‘dalit’ of Europe. Hitler had considered them as much a ‘problem’ as the Jews and had also sent them to concentration camps. Last year Sarkozy had deported ‘migrant gypsies’, raising a controversy in the European Union. Today there are an estimated 10 million Roma living in almost all the countries in Europe, and making up nearly 10% of the population in some countries in Eastern Europe like Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia and Serbia. Though they are citizens of European countries, they are discriminated, being subject to hate crimes, lack proper health and education services and their living conditions, as I was to see later in another place called Vanatori, barely better than poor rural or slum homes in India. It was difficult to imagine how they survived the winters, with temperatures dropping well below freezing.

This child hadn't been immunised

Historically the Roma are supposed to have migrated to Europe from India nearly a thousand years ago. From some accounts they went from Rajasthan, and according to others from Punjab. Genetic studies have confirmed these links. A more obvious connection is the many similar words that Romani language shares with Hindi or Indian languages. The words for eyes, nose, teeth in Roma are also ‘aankh’, ‘naak’, ‘dant’ an eerie similarity. Many Roma look so similar to us South Asians, that they can be easily mistaken as either Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi. My colleague Sunita and I were very warmly greeted whenever we met some Roma.

It was tragic to see children who don’t go to school or have not been immunized. We were told that nearly fifty percent of Roma children do not receive the compulsory vaccines. We saw a one month old baby who had been born at home with the support of her grandmother. None of her three older siblings had also been born in hospital. The local health system of general practitioners and insurance based coverage, seemed totally inappropriate for the Roma, who still need to be convinced of the value of modern medicines in many places. The social distance between the Romanian or Bulgarian doctor and the Roma woman, seemed as much as that between a dalit or tribal woman in north India and the PHC doctor. The big difference was that most Roma did not have health insurance, even though they were citizens, and thus had no claim to the service. However over the last five years efforts are on in Europe through the Decade of Roma Inclusion to make special provisions for the all round development of the Roma. A system of Roma Health Mediators (community health educators) has been started in Romania and is also being piloted in other countries like Bulgaria and Macedonia. The EU has provided special funds to these countries to improve the situation of the Roma. Unfortunately, the overall financial situation in Europe is poor and there are widespread cuts in social spending and we heard of hospitals being closed during our short visit. The one silver lining that I saw was that the more educated and professional Roma are coming together to provide additional support to their community. While some have started NGOs, others are providing volunteer services. It is my privilege to have worked with some of them and strengthen their efforts.

With some Roma women volunteers