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Mali: Child Marriage a Neglected Problem
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UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
30 August 2007
Posted to the web 30 August 2007
Nioro Du Sahel
Two years ago, in the western Malian village of Korera-Kore, a 13-year-old girl was forced into marriage during her school summer holiday. She died after complications during sex on her wedding night.
This young Malian, whose case was documented by a local organisation called the Coordination of Women's Associations and Non-governmental organisations (CAFO), is one of more than 60 million women globally who were married or in union before the age of 18, according to estimates by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).
Campaigners say forced early marriage, or child marriage, is a problem that has been largely untouched by the international community. In Mali it is considered by the research organisation Population Council as "one of the most severe crises of child marriage in the world today"; the few workers in this field say progress is too slow.
"There hasn't been a really concerted effort to address the issue [at the international level]," said Naana Otoo-Oyortey, a founding member of the Forum on Marriage and the Rights of Women and Girls, a network of mostly UK-based organisations who campaign against early marriage and violence against women. "It's been a neglected issue."
Otoo-Oyortey said unlike female genital mutilation/cutting, which is prohibited in many international conventions, child marriage receives little visibility and little funding from donors for programmes to reduce the practice, despite its link to increased rates of maternal mortality, fistula and HIV/AIDS.
Slow decline
Legal framework
In Mali, a girl is legally allowed to wed at the age of 15 with the consent of her parents. In some cases, girls younger than 15 can wed with the authorisation of a judge.
A government bill that would, among other things, raise the legal age of marriage to 18 has been on the books for five years, but has yet to be passed.
"Now, it's a question of political will," said Bakary Traoré, technical adviser on children at the Malian Ministry for the Promotion of Women, Children and Family.
According to Founé Samaké, lawyer and member of the Clinique juridique des femmes maliennes, a legal aid clinic, Malian law punishes the abduction of women for forced marriage by one to five years in prison. When the abducted girl is less than 15 years old, the sentence is up to 10 years of forced labour and, at the discretion of the judge, an injunction banning the convicted person from specified places for up to 20 years.
But enforcing the law is an "arduous task", Samaké said, because family members are often accomplices in the forced marriage.
In Mali, according to the latest statistics from the 2001 Demographic and Health Survey, 65 percent of women aged 20-24 were married by the age of 18, one of the highest rates in the world. Nationwide, 25 percent of girls were married by the age of 15, and one in 10 married girls aged 15-19 gave birth before age 15.
While this marks a decrease since 1987, when 79 percent of Malian women married as children, advocates say the numbers are not dropping fast enough, largely because not enough people are working on the subject.
"The global trend has been a slow decline," said Nassra Abass, a consultant in UNICEF's child protection section in New York. "[But] there's definitely a lot more that we can do."
She said UNICEF's focus has been on reducing female genital cutting (FGC), a movement that has "momentum", unlike child marriage, honour killings and other traditional practices considered harmful by the UN.
"There have not been very many resources or much time invested in early marriage. There aren't many programmes running. That's why the decline is slow," Abass told IRIN.
Dangers
The mild decline in early marriage in Mali has been attributed to the few education and awareness raising programmes that do exist.
In the western Malian region of Kayes, where 83 percent of girls are married by the age of 18, particular effort has been paid to informing people of the risks of early marriage.
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According to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), girls aged 15-19 are twice as likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth as women aged 20-24. Among girls aged 10-14, the risk is five times greater. Early onset of sexual activity has also been linked to increased risk of HIV/AIDS because child brides are less likely to be educated and more likely to have unprotected sex with older men who have had more sexual partners.
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