Health
Indian girls fight back against child marriage
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-11-19 15:33
Kalindi chose not to be one of the many child brides in India's 1.1 billion-plus population destined for early wedlock.
Though the numbers are falling, India's latest nationwide health survey said nearly half of women aged 20-24 years were married before they turned 18 and more than a fifth wed before they turned 16. Some 3 percent married before they turned 13.
Parents sometimes use force to make their girls marry, and early motherhood can also prove fatal.
"In some cases, when the girls revolted the parents stopped giving food to the girls," Kundu said. "These girls don't have enough to eat and are all child laborers. But their strength to resist child marriage amazes us."
SORRY FIGURES
Child brides often do not use contraceptives, and face high fertility rates, unwanted pregnancies and abortions.
Some join the roughly 78,000 Indian mothers who, according to a 2009 UNICEF report, die every year in childbirth and from pregnancy complications.
The high mortality rate, which lags far behind India's Millenium Development Goals and rival China, is another sign of how often rural women have been excluded from a recent economic boom that lifted millions of others out of poverty.
One state where child marriage is widespread and socially acceptable is Rajasthan, whose desert safaris and ornate palaces make it a magnet for foreign tourists.
But village women workers have long fought against the practice, braving violent resistance and even rape to do so.
"Only recently the child marriage of a girl called Babloo was stopped in Jodhpur region by these village social workers after her parents were convinced," said Anuradha Maharishi, a UNICEF official working in the state.
Babloo could signal a gradual trend, as across India early marriages are slowly in decline. The same government survey said 44.5 percent of women aged 20-24 married before the legal age in 2005-6, down from 54.2 percent in 1992-93.
"I think there'll be a positive reaction," Kundu said about Indian society's view of girls fighting back.
"If the girls in other districts know girls from their age and their poor backgrounds are saying 'no' to marriage, they will also come out and speak their minds."
