Recognising children

In a country where around 21 percent of citizens get married before reaching the age of 19, the Child Marriage Restraint (Amendment) Bill 2018, which was successfully passed by the Senate of Pakistan on Monday, comes as good news. The bill will now need to be approved by the National Assembly. In the Senate, there was significant opposition to the bill – a sad reality in a country which desperately needs to protect the rights of its women and children. Religious parties, including the JI and the JUI-F, strongly opposed the legislation, while the PTI appeared to have fallen into confusion over the matter and abstained from voting either way. This is not a good omen for a country where the maternal mortality rate stands at around 175 per every 100,000 live births and where one woman dies every 20 minutes in childbirth. Early pregnancies are one of the factors behind these deaths. There are many other reports on the complications suffered by child-wives, who become pregnant before their bodies have matured, contributing both to Pakistan’s high infant mortality rate and a fertility rate which stands at the highest in South Asia. There are numerous stories about the situation child brides face and the problems they encounter when they are married off, sometimes at the age of a mere 12 or 13 years.The bill passed by the Senate was moved by Senator Sherry Rahman, who has fought for it over many months. While the assemblies in Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have already passed similar laws barring marriages below the age of 18, the new law, if it succeeds in making it through the NA, will cover the entire country. The bill essentially defines anyone under the age of 18 as a child for purposes of marriage. Despite the alarming figures on the health and societal dangers of early marriage, the degree of opposition to the bill suggests that we still have a long direction to walk before we can claim we are successfully able to keep young women and girls safe. Poverty is often a factor in early marriages, with child brides sold off by desperate families, notably in Sindh and southern Punjab, often to much older men. The proposals from senators affiliated with religious parties that the bill be sent to the Council for Islamic Ideology for its opinion was thankfully rejected. Several previous bills on the same issue already lie with the CII. The passage of the bill, which has been endorsed unanimously by the Senate’s Standing Committee on Human Rights, takes us one step forward. We still have many other steps to tread before we can create a more hospitable environment for our women and girls.

from The News International - Editorial http://bit.ly/2UWgwBu