WUNRN
Senegal - Girls' Early Marriage - End of Education
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Girls
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DAKAR, 5 July 2010 (IRIN) -
Twelve-year-old Rama* in Senegal’s Sédhiou region is still in school instead of
wedded to a man in his 40s, after community members convinced her father to
abandon the family’s plan to give her away.
But
in most cases family or social pressure to marry off young girls still wins out
in many regions of the country, researchers and educators say.
“It is
quite common to see parents remove their daughters from school to force them
into marriage,” Saliou Sarr, secondary school principal in Mpal, 33km from the
city of Saint-Louis, told IRIN.
National
statistics on the number of girls leaving school to get married are not
available, an Education Ministry official said.
In
Sarr’s school 10 percent of girls aged 12-15 leave school annually because of
family-arranged marriages. In a high school in the town of
“Many
parents say they push marriage for fear their daughters will start to have sex
for money or because keeping them in the household becomes too expensive,” Sarr
told IRIN.
He
explained that in
While
some families worry about what they see as the risks of not marrying off their
girls, the risks of forced early marriage are many - particularly for health,
said reproductive health expert Fatim Thiam.
Law versus custom
Senegalese
law holds that if a girl is under 18 the man must wait to consummate the
marriage but “in practice this is never respected”, said Abdoulaye Seck,
vice-president of Amnesty International in Senegal.
Marriage
is legal from age 18; for girls aged 16-18 parents must give authorization; for
those aged 13-16, a judge must decide. Marriage to girls under 13 is unlawful.
But as
in 12-year-old Rama’s case, for many, custom outweighs the law.
“The
father argued that he had to marry off his daughter because pressure from
elders in the family was so great,” said Lamine Sané, history and geography
teacher in Sédhiou and coordinator of a human rights and awareness club Amnesty
launched in high schools in 2008. He and his colleagues met Rama’s father after
she broke down crying one day in class and told of the marriage plan.
“We
referred the matter to a prosecutor who then called for legal mediation…
Eventually the father abandoned the plan.”
Sané
said since awareness of the issue has expanded, communities have often been
turning to the media or the justice system to put pressure on families who
would give away their young girls.
But
most forced marriages go uncontested. A recent study by UN Children’s Fund
(UNICEF) and the
* Not
her real name