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Child Brides as Slave Labor
By Barbara Crossette on Nov 03, 2014
Narmada, above, was able to avoid child
marriage through the support of the Mamidipudi Venkatarangaiya Foundation, a
nonprofit group in India that works to abolish child labor and ensure education
for all children. It is a member of Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to
End Child Marriage. TOM SHORE/THE ELDERS
During the six years that Gulnara Shahinian served as the first United
Nations special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, she said on
numerous occasions, as well as in a 2012 report to the General Assembly, that
girls forced to marry against their will end up being condemned to a life of
servility and abuse.
“As with all forms of slavery, in order to
tackle this problem head on, servile marriages should be criminalized,”
Shahinian, an Armenian lawyer and expert on trafficking, said in a statement on
the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery in December 2012. “Nothing
can justify these forms of slavery; not traditional, religious, cultural
economic or even security considerations.”
Apart from child brides, victims of forced
marriage include adult women in nonconsensual unions, wives sold or given away
as payment of debts and women who are “inherited” by another member of a dead
husband’s family. All are vulnerable to domestic violence, sexual abuse,
life-threatening living conditions and infections such as HIV-AIDS. Many are
forced into the basest forms of servitude and a brutal daily existence in homes
they did not choose.
In recent years, the issue of child
marriage has received growing attention in campaigns by many organizations,
including Girls
Not Brides and Anti-Slavery International. This year,
coincident with the end of Shahinian’s term as special rapporteur, AIDS-Free
World, an international advocacy organization that has moved
significantly into women’s rights as AIDS has become a women’s disease in many
places, challenged the International Labor Organization, the oldest
specialized agency of the UN, to explain why it refuses to recognize that child
marriage is demonstrably child labor and forced labor.
The International Labor Organization, in a
2012 report titled “Hard to See, Harder to Count:
Survey Guidelines to Estimate Forced Labor of Adults and Children,”
specifically ruled out child marriage as trafficking. But the convoluted
reasoning raised only more questions.
The report said: “Human trafficking can
also be regarded as forced labor, and these guidelines can be used to measure
the full spectrum of human trafficking abuses or what some people call
‘modern-day slavery.’ The only exceptions to this are cases of trafficking for
organ removal, forced marriage or adoption, unless the latter practices
result in forced labor.” [Italics added.]
Yet 85 years ago, the organization, known
as ILO, had affirmed: The ILO Forced Labor Convention, 1930 (No. 29) defines
forced or compulsory labor as “all work or service which is exacted from any
person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not
offered himself voluntarily.” [ILO italics.]
These definitions continue to fall into the
framework of employer-employee relations, not relationships within the home or
family. When AIDS-Free World demanded an explanation, it found the response
from the agency “confusing and shocking: the adult labor performed by child
wives does not qualify for ILO protection because it takes place within the
girls’ own home,” the advocacy group said.
“By refusing to categorize child marriage
as child labor,” the group added, “the ILO diminishes the intense impact of
child marriages on girls — it is one horrific violation that triggers many
others.”
Perhaps the UN agency needs some updating
based on emerging data — and changes in social attitudes, though a handful of
reticent countries citing tradition can always stall progress in the UN. In the
next decade, 14.2 million girls under 18 will be married each year — more than
140 million over the 10-year period, according to advocacy organizations, using
figures from the United Nations Population Fund.
Complications from too-early pregnancies
and childbirth are the leading causes of death for girls aged 15 to 19, and
girls under 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women
between the ages of 20 to 24. Girls as young as 5 or 6 may also be victims of
forced sex committed by much older men.
South Asia, with India far in the lead
globally, has the largest number and highest rate of child marriages as a
region; India is followed, in order, by West and Central Africa, sub-Saharan
Africa and Eastern and Southern Africa. East Asia and the Pacific, the Middle
East and North Africa and former Soviet-bloc countries fare the best, with
Latin America and the Caribbean in between.
UN agency staff members in the field have
seen many cases of forced domestic servitude and abuse of child brides.
Nongovernmental groups have also heard terrible stories from girls who have
been rescued.
“From the moment a girl is forced into marriage, her life is
irreparably altered,” AIDS-Free World said in its account of its interaction
with the International Labor Organization. “That one decision, made by other
people without her consent, permanently removes all of her fundamental rights
as a child — to education, health, rest, leisure, play and recreation,
protection from violence, and protection from performing any work that is
likely to harm her physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development. .
. . They will be exploited by their societies; they should not be abandoned by
the United Nations.”