by When the wedding season arrives in India, the telephone of children’s rights activist Tatwashil Kamble never stops ringing with profession to stop girls to get married because of poverty.
Kamble said he helped to stop thousands of illegal marriages in India, where wedding is banned before the age of 18.
“The elderly of the village think:” How do we dare to put a marriage in their village! “Said Kamble, who has been campaigning for more than a decade in the state of West -Maharashtra.
Many families are motivated by poverty to marry their daughters, so that the girls can start earning their own bread.
When activists have tried to stop marriages, “according to Kamble, it led to physical quarrels”.
Sometimes they can prevent the marriages from taking place, or, if they arrive late, the bride is taken to a hiding place and supported in deciding on her own future.
According to the child of the world, India is good for the world, according to the UN children’s office, with at least 1.5 million girls who get married every year.
Kamble said that he is being driven by the bitter memory of seeing a teenager who dies of blood loss during delivery.
“That is when I thought: so many young girls are getting married and even after their death it is not called child wedding. They say” the mother died “” without acknowledging that she was a girl.
– Wedding Hotline –
Kamble works in the corresponding district of Maharashtra, an area that is dominated by vast sugar cane fields that get hard due to years of drought.
Employees said they have little choice, but to marry their daughters of young – with the argument that they do it to protect the girl, no damage to her.
“It’s not like we don’t like the idea of education,” said Manisha Barde, a sugar cane cutter who was a child bride himself.
“We want her to become a doctor.”
Barde, however, arranged that her teenage daughter only married to be stopped by the authorities.
She did this because they were poor and, if they “had better jobs, we wouldn’t have thought of her marriage”.
Agricultural workers said that when their children are small, family members take care of them or come to the fields.
But when the girls become teenagers, their parents start to worry – or that they can start a relationship before marriage, or are subject to sexual violence.
“There are few girls who remain unmarried until 18,” said Ashok Tangde, district head of the children’s welfare committee.
“I have seen girls who have never seen a school,” he said.
Families worry about “the safety of the girl,” Tang said, and even those who are against children’s marriage can eventually organize a wedding.
Tangde said that his team 321 received calls from the entire district about child marriages that took place, or were about to happen, in the first five months of this year.
During the peak wedding season, which runs from October to March, Tang said that he will receive about 10 to 15 phone calls every day, who encourage his team and other activists to invade ceremonies.
– ‘Do the right one’ –
Tangde has a dedicated network of activists and other informants who help in villages in the district and send photos of weddings.
“There are people who want to do the right thing,” he said.
Sometimes the bride calls directly. Other times a guest passes and the authorities listen to the wedding music.
“Disrupt a wedding … there is a lot of drama,” Tangde said.
“People are getting ready to put together those who are going to stop such marriages.”
Jyoti Thorat was 16 when her parents married her with a 20-year-old man, end her hope to go to school and become a member of the police.
“My parents solved it, and I wasn’t happy,” said Thorat, ten years later and a mother of two school boys.
Her older sisters had also been married before they turned 18, giving her parents priority to get their only son trained.
Thorat remembered with despair how the work of Cane Cane beckoned shortly after her wedding, a fate that other girls wait.
“They have to work as sugar cane workers that same year,” she said. “A machete is ready.”
ASH/PJM/RSC/CWL/Fox
