Forced Marriage

Yesterday, the UK news site, The Asian News, posted an article about the release of Belonging, by Manchester City Councillor Sameem Ali. Heart-rending, Belonging is a story of “of appalling domestic cruelty. But it is also a story about the cultural conflicts of a Pakistani family new to Britain[1].” The crucial issue in the story is forced marriage—when she was thirteen, Ms. Ali was sent to Pakistan, where she was forced to marry a man in his late twenties.

Child marriage has a long history. In the modern day Western World, children have a childhood. At twelve, they climb trees, they play video games, and they go to school. But the idea of childhood is a relatively new one—during Great Britian’s Industrial revolution (nineteenth century) children as young as five were working in the factories. In fact, child labour laws weren’t introduced until 1833, when legislation preventing children under nine working was first introduced (several well-known authors, including Charles Dickens and more effectively, Charles Kingsley, chronicled the issues of the child in their works, with Kinglsey’s The Water Babies ultimately effecting change in the Upper House). Considering this, it’s not surprising that children in the developing world go to work rather than school and have children rather than dances. But, in contemporary society, we are so far removed from the realities of the 19th and early 20th centuries that we are quick to judge.

To fairly consider the plight of children in the developing world, we have to first recognise that most, if not all children’s issue are tangled, interwoven with issues of poverty, hunger and famine, ignorance and lack of education, and shorter life spans, to name just a few. Like children in nineteenth century Europe, children in so-called third world countries[2] don’t have childhoods. Instead, they work, raise children, and care for sick elders (remembering that elders can be as young as thirty). Adulthood is forced upon them early; girls are married at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Here, in the comfort of my light-filled, well-appointed bedroom, it is easy for me to shudder and be appalled at the situation these girls are in. But as someone with an understanding of biological imperatives and an interest in anthropology, I can see that in certain situations, certain places in the world, early marriage is part of a family’s survival.

Let’s take a minute to think about what I’ve just written. It sounds horrific, condoning, even to my own ears. So we’ll play the hypothetical game, shall we?

Rashida is a twelve year old Indian girl. She’s a happy-go-lucky child, fortunate enough to go to school. But this year, her village’s access to clean water has been restricted—rainfall is at around 43% of the previous year’s—and the nearest ground water well is just over two miles away. What will Rashida’s family do? There are four of them—a mother, a six month old baby girl, a five year old boy, and Rashida[4]. The boy can continue on at the small school—there, at least, he’ll be taken care of. The baby is still breast feeding and sickly, so Rashida’s mother must stay home with her. Which leaves Rashida to walk two miles to the well and two miles back to bring enough clean water for drinking, cooking, and washing. Even if she gets up very early, she’ll be late for school, if she’s not too tired to attend, that is.

Two years pass; Rashida is now fourteen. Her sister is two and half, her brother is seven, and her mother is sickly. Although a new well has been dug and the village has access to clean water again, but now there’s little to eat. After being fired from her job as a domestic, Rashida has been working in the fields to feed her family but, on her own, she can’t earn enough. A family from a neighbouring village is interested in marrying Rashida to their son—they’re willing to offer enough for the would-be smaller family to survive until Rashida’s brother is old enough to find work. When her mother agrees to the marriage, Rashida is frightened but excited and not at all surprised. Perhaps her new life will be less exhausting. Perhaps it will be nice to take care of her own children rather than her siblings. Perhaps it will be awful and her husband will be cruel. She doesn’t know.

Does any of this mean that it’s right for Rashida to be forced into marriage to a man she’s never met, whom she most certainly does not love? No. But, in context, it’s much more understandable.

Now, let’s turn to forced marriage in the Western World. As Ms. Ali says in the article, “My mother died about five years ago, and every time I asked her about why she did what she did to me, she would avoid the question. I think that she was lost in this country [the UK]. She didn’t know how to cope[3]." Was it right for Ms. Ali’s mother to treat her as a slave then force her into marriage? No. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But as Ms. Ali herself points out, her mother was lost, the product of a society closer to the hypothetical Rashida’s than the late-twentieth century society she lived in. But as Ms. Ali points out, "Back then, people, organisations, the system would not tread on the toes of the community[5]”. So what about now? Although the UK has a forced marriage unit in the Home Office, forced marriage is still happening. The government may be aware of the issue, but is it doing enough to not just help women in such a predicament, but to prevent forced marriage from happening?

A friend of mine has suggested that the world as it stands is too separatist, that we need to create larger communities, such as the European Union, to take smaller less developed nations under the wing and help them grow, educate their citizens, and find their place in the modern world, thereby eliminating issues such as forced marriage. Some have suggested that a greater emphasis on immigrant assimilation is needed, while yet others (including myself) talk about the benefits of education and understanding. It’s likely that the answer, if there is one, is a combination of all three.

But the thing we must consider, must remember? In the comments posted below the article. The first is from a disgruntled reader, insistent that forced marriages between young girls and older men don’t happen. As I write this, the last is from one such girl who says, “I was 12 when I was taking to away and forced into marriage and that was only 3 years ago[5]”.

[1] Forced Marriage is Wrong…I Had to Escape, The Asian News, http://www.theasiannews.co.uk/news/s/1038693_forced_marriage_is_wrongi_had_to_escape
[2] Although most of us use the term ‘Third world’ to refer to countries within the developing world, its original usage was in reference to a neutral party, such as Switzerland. The term was first used to describe developing or under-developed countries by French economist and demographer Alfred Sauvy.
[3] Forced Marriage is Wrong…I Had to Escape, The Asian News, http://www.theasiannews.co.uk/news/s/1038693_forced_marriage_is_wrongi_had_to_escape
[4] Where is Rashida's father? Oftentimes, families have only one parent--sometimes the father instead of the mother. Parents die, leave, and in some places, men are conscripted.
[5] Forced Marriage is Wrong…I Had to Escape, Comments, The Asian News, http://www.theasiannews.co.uk/news/c/1038693_forced_marriage_is_wrongi_had_to_escape
[6] ibid.