”I got married at the age of 10 and my bride was also of the same age,” says Veeru, a 40-year-old landless farmer in a village in district Tando Allahyar, 200km northeast of Karachi. Now father of five children — four sons and a daughter — three years ago, he arranged the marriages of his daughter and a son at the age of 10 and 12 respectively, thus repeating what had been done to him.

He followed the dictates of his community and these marriages were the result of ‘Badlo’ or ‘Watta Satta’, local words for marriages arranged in exchange of daughters. “My son, Mithoo, now 15, was in class 5 when he got married but did not go back to school, and my daughter-in-law, Dharmi, was never sent to school as per the local tradition,” reflects Veeru.

Not willing to break the tradition, Veeru is all set to marry his second son, 13-year-old Narain, a class 8 student, in December this year. Veeru is aware of the disruption of his son’s studies but he appears helpless before social pressure.

The dilemma of child marriages in rural Sindh

“If we refuse to marry our children a heavy social fine will be imposed on us along with a community boycott,” he says.

An elderly uncle of Narain thinks that “only the government can stop this tradition from our community as we cannot stop it by ourselves. If the government ensures the implementation of law forbidding child marriages, we will breathe a sigh of relief.”

The dilemma facing Veeru and his community is not an isolated case; child marriages are widespread in rural parts of Sindh as well as other parts of the country. Globally around 15 million girls are married before the age of 18 each year and the practice is most common in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, according to Girls Not Brides, a London-based international organisation working on the issue. South Asia has the highest prevalence of child marriage in the world with Bangladesh at the top in the region (52 percent), followed by India (47 percent), Nepal (37 percent), Afghanistan (33 percent) and Pakistan (21 percent) in 2016.

It is believed that education is a key factor that can discourage child marriage. To improve education facilities the Sindh government has increased the allocation for education by 24 percent in the current budget (2017-2018).

However, merely an increase in budgetary allocation will not improve the situation as it has been observed in the past that much of the budget is underutilised — only the non-development part that is spent on salaries is fully utilised. Reforms are necessary in the education sector so as to increase the enrolment and retention levels of children — particularly of girls — to reduce early child marriages.

In Pakistan’s context, child marriage is connected with tradition, culture and customary practices. It sometimes involves the transfer of money, settlement of debts or exchange of daughters under the traditions of vani, swara or watta satta from place to place, sanctioned by a Jirga or Panchayat (council of elders from the community).

At present, the minimum legal age of marriage for women is 16 years and 18 years for men in Pakistan under the Child Marriage Act 1929. In Sindh, where the practice is most prevalent, the marriage age was revised for boys and girls, after the passage of the The Sindh Child Marriage Restraint Act 2013 by the provincial assembly. According to this bill, marriage below the age of 18 for both boys and girls is punishable by law. This has made the Sindh Assembly the first assembly in the country to pass such a bill. Under this bill, in cases of underage marriage, the parents, the bride and the groom can all be sentenced to three years in prison and can be fined with 45,000 rupees. However, the law is hardly implemented and the practice of child marriage is still rampant in the province.

Early marriage is deemed an important instrument to strengthen relationships through watta satta and to protect family ‘honour’ — the community believes sexual assaults on young girls is avoided if they’re married at a young age and thus avoids ‘damaging’ their ‘honour’. In acute poverty, early marriage also reduces the economic burden of rearing a girl child. For the parents of a young boy, marriage is a tool to impel him to work, abjure all connections to childhood and is a source of pride.

The issue is deep-rooted in rural communities of Sindh and to curtail it would require earnest social guidance in addition to the force of law and its implementation. To complement the efforts of ending child marriages, raising awareness and inspiring rural communities to take action, various NGOs organise the communities through social mobilisation. Once organised, local associations ask to form community groups, taking at least one family member from from 15-25 households. Once the groups are formed they are are provided with social guidance with technical and financial support to improve the quality of their lives. Though ending child marriage is not an explicit target, the Sindh Union Council and Community Economic Strengthening Support Programme plans to reach 770,000 households in eight districts of Sindh by 2021 and expects to reduce child marriages through increase in income and health, education and awareness levels of the targeted communities.

Dr Abdur Rehman Cheema is Team Leader Research at Rural Support Programmes Network. He can be reached at arehmancheema@gmail.com.
He tweets @ARehmanCheema

Nadir Ali Shah is an anthropologist who can be reached at nadir.ali@rspn.org.pk.

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 9th, 2017