ISLAMABAD: The press came under fire for not devoting enough time to important social issues on Wednesday as mediapersons, activists and members of civil society came together for a consultation on the evil of early child marriages.

Organised by Oxfam Novib and moderated by TV and radio personality Tauseeq Haider, the media engagement session featured lively discussion on issues such as the precedence of culture over laws and religion, which compelled most parents to marry off their children at a very young age.

Keynote speaker Fauzia Waqar, who is the chairperson of the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women, told the audience that “child marriage is, in all practical senses, forced marriage and is a denial of rights issue”.

“Culture must not stand in the way of rights. It is often invoked in the name of religion, but that is incorrect,” she said, stressing that under Pakistani law, it was illegal to marry off children younger than the age of 16.

Different provinces have different minimum ages while Sindh’s is the most progressive law, she said, adding that newly promulgated laws in Punjab had criminalised child marriages and imposed harsher punishments on parents and the nikah khwaan (the person solemnising the marriage).

She also explained that there was a direct correlation between early marriages and health and education. She said that women who are married off at a very early age do not usually have the option to go to school, while those that do invariably end up waiting longer to get married. The health of girls who bear children at a very young age also suffers, leading to a rise in infant and maternal mortality.

Quoting statistics from official surveys, she said that in Pakistan, while the incidence of reported child marriages had come down from eight per cent to 1.7 per cent in 2013, over 40 per cent of Pakistani women were still getting married before the age of 18.

She also said that according to the statistics, at least eight per cent of women aged 15-19 had already given birth after marriage. She also spoke about the need to challenge the tendency in women to internalise oppression by trying to justify spousal abuse. “Denial of human rights on the basis of cultural relativism is not permissible under the law,” she said.

In the open house session that followed, participants questioned the media’s response to such incidents, saying that by and large, such issues were almost never covered by the mainstream media.

However, anchorperson Waseem Badami pointed out that since it was a commercial entity, the media was subject to concerns such as ratings and there was pressure from employers to make content more engaging.

He suggested that NGOs and civil society work with mediapersons to find case studies and stories that should be highlighted in order to spark a debate on the issue of child marriages on TV. He also blamed audiences, saying that when “we do shows on health, early child marriage, and other human rights issues, we never get viewership”.

He pointed out that there was a private channel devoted to healthcare issues, but nobody watched it.

Farooq Qaiser, writer and famed puppeteer, told the audience how, in the more remote parts of the country, women were not allowed to watch TV because men appeared on it.

“When we went into the field with Unicef, we were told that the only show women were allowed to watch was [ours] because it didn’t have any male cast members,” he said, stressing that content needed to be more engaging in order to attract and educate audiences.

He also urged the development sector to put more money into media campaigns that may actually work.

Published in Dawn, December 10th, 2015