The influx in number of CHILD-BRIDES in INDIA, one of the more populated countries in the world, and yet, it’s still, too god DAMN F***ING (maxed out???) BACKWARDS, from the New York Times that came with the Sunday papers, by K. Schultz and S. Raj…
The well-wishers had all gathered even though neither the teenage bride-to-be nor her mother wanted the girl to go through with the wedding. It took a police raid to stop it, and even then it was nearly too late.
It is hard to state the age of Deepa Kumari, the betrothed girl, with any certainty. A government identification card lists it as 15. Her father, accused to selling Deepa for about $300 to the groom, a 31-year-old laborer, insists that she is 17. A local constable put the number at 13.
In any case, by dusk on that February evening, a group of plainclothes police officers stormed the village of Madhura in Bihar state. They chased men into fields and detained the bride and the groom, already covered in turmeric powder to prepare for the ceremony, for further questioning.
Speaking to reporters at the police station later, Deepa Kumari, with downcast eyes, made her position clear: “I will not marry, sir”, she said, “I want to study.”
India’s child marriage rate is one of the highest in the world, with a long list of social and economic pressures, from poverty to a dearth of education opportunities, propping up the number.
But as awareness has spread about the detriments associated with underage marriages, and as authorities have responded more diligently, the prevalence has dropped. In some areas, it has done so sharply.
Data released by UNICEF this month found that a girl’s risk of marrying before her 18th birthday in South Asia fell by more than a third in the last decade, from nearly fifty-percent to about thirty-percent, in large part because of progress in India.
Child marriage here is finely threaded with other practices, including the exchange of a dowry from the bride’s family to the groom, and sometimes with sex trafficking, making it difficult to tackle any one issue without addressing others. Social workers said there are no easy solutions.
and, how about this one??? Photo still from online…
“You cannot wave a magic stick,” said Anand Madhab, principal consultant at the Gender Resource Center, an organization that supports women’s empowerment. “It’s a deep-seated problem.”
Bihar, a poor, agrarian state in northern India, has one of the highest rates of underage marriages in the country, according to India’s national Family Health Survey. In 2005, sixty-nine percent of surveyed women said they married when they were underage. Ten years later, the number fell to 42.5 percent.
So, the situation of child brides is slowly improving, but NOT at a fast-enough rate, because, despite how the number of child brides had dropped somewhat in number based off of statistics, there are still younger girls forced to marry older men by their parents’ wishes, because it can help out the family economics, and that’s just wrong, and why should we be the ones, getting SOLD out to some old geezer, if our families are having a difficult time, making it.