One third of the World’s child brides live in India according to the latest UNICEF report.
Personally, I am wary of all statistics, numbers, polls etc. I would rather talk about the presence of child marriages in India. So, irrespective of the numbers (ok, sometimes they are important!) why haven’t we as a country been successful at addressing this issue. Same with other issues such as child labour.
“A society cannot thrive if its youngest members are forced into early marriage, abused as sex workers or denied their basic rights,” UNICEF chief Ann Veneman said.
The silent misery these children are subjected to, whether in child marriages or as child labourers is a violation of human rights. I had written a post about Revolt of the Bride where the girl had the courage and support to revolt against her marriage. May her tribe increase!
Education is the key. When I say education, it is not limited to sending children to school. It is also about creating awareness among parents. Children should be stopped from being treated as ‘economic burdens’. In most of the cases, poverty is the culprit. Poverty drives parents to marry children at a young age so that they would not have to bear the economic burden. It is important that we attempt not only to change attitudes in families, but also provide opportunities to ease their economic burden. Read more here.
This edition of Progress for Children, the eighth in the series that monitors progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), is a compendium of data that serves as a report card on global and national efforts to protect the rights of children.
The report also offers a strategy to improve child protection, identifying five areas of activity that are needed to improve protective environments for children: 1) Improving child protection systems; 2) Promoting social change; 3) Enhancing child protection in emergencies; 4) Strengthening partnerships for greater impact; 5) Collecting reliable data and using such data to achieve concrete results for children.
You can read the detailed report here.
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