ALYAZYA

Social Impacts

1. Education & Poverty

Being victims of backward ideologies, numerous girls lose their opportunity to prosper within their community, one that is continually oppressing them. The United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) stated that most child brides are forced to end their education under their husbands’ commands. Why? It’s because men believe that a girl’s sole purpose is to wed and reproduce. This was explained in 1949 by Simone de Beauvoir, a philosopher, a feminist and a social theorist, who wrote in her book The Other Sex: men unite a woman’s value and worth with her womb, overlooking her value in production, making them worthless outside of childbearing.

A girl’s “disobedience” is also blamed on education. Mahammadu Saidu, a child bride’s former husband stated that she was rebellious because “she had too much ABCD.” He continued to say:

“If she is educated, she will be looking down on me … she will be the husband and I will be the wife.”

Gender and knowledge are mutually exclusive? These words display the terrifying gender-discriminating social construction of this region. Without education, children are stuck in a helpless loop; they are powerless against their fathers and will become powerless against their husbands’ decisions to marry off their daughters in the future.

(Where Poverty Comes In)

When poverty plays a role, people turn a blind eye to the effects child marriage has on girls. There are families who don’t necessarily want to give away their daughters but the bride money they’re offered in return is more than the money they make annually. When Maimuna, a former child-bride, begged her father to keep her in school rather than marry her off, he turned her down saying “it’s what is good for the family and the community.”

This is nothing more than a misconception because, in reality, child marriage traps these girls in poverty that they might have been able to overcome if they were kept in school.

Psychological Impacts

1. Virginity & Self-worth

In a place that doesn’t view females beyond their bodies, it’s ordinary that they develop toxic concepts of self-worth. It destroys their self- esteem and constructs destructive ideals for them.

A girl’s sex is seen as her family’s honor that can be preserved through early marriage, avoiding the risk of premarital pregnancy and bringing shame to their name. Since a girl’s sex is important, virginity tests are normally practiced, despite being discredited by The World Health Organization (WHO) and recognized as an “abusive practice.” For instance, in Zimbabwe, these tests consist of inserting two fingers into girls’ vaginas, who are as young as 12-years-old. Then, virgins get marked on their foreheads to be “claimed” by men.

Allow me to repeat myself.

Men claim little girls as their wives after being marked as “fresh virgins.”

This heart-wrecking illustration of how women are viewed as a property generates a disheartening feeling among young girls. They start seeing themselves as nothing more than products: sold and bought.

(The Religious Factor)

There’s a high correlation between religiousness and early child marriage. Who would’ve guessed?

Religion sets social and cultural ideologies that justify early child marriage. It also frames the idea that a family’s honor is in a girl’s sex. The United Nations (UN) found that Christians and Muslims are more likely to marry off their daughters than others. In Nigeria “1 in 5 girls are married before the age of 15.” This increases to 1 in 2 girls in Northern Nigeria, where child marriage is accepted under Islamic Sharia Law.

In Muslim concentrated area, girls “as young as 5 now hide their heads and shoulders in hijabs” and “some girls become wives as early as age 9.”

2. Domestic Abuse & Suicide

Let’s cut to the chase.

• Married girls aged 10–17, and those who are promised marriage are more likely to have suicidal thoughts than those who are not.
• Girls who receive marriage requests are twice as likely to attempt suicide than girls living in protective communities.
• Child brides are more likely to face domestic violence than mature women.
• I know, this is outside Sub-Saharan Africa, but in Egypt, 29% of child brides are abused by their husbands and left with physical, emotional and mental scars.

And these are only the ones that have been reported.

Domestic abuse often ends a girl’s life.

They lose their willingness to live. They fear being hurt again.

The abuse is unimaginable.

Maimuna was brutally beaten by her husband to the point that “the doctors feared he dislocated her jaw.” When she ran away to her father’s house, seeking his sympathy and begging him to take her back, he hit her.

“Her back and arms bristled with angry welts where her father had whipped her for fleeing to him.”

Here, we are faced by a father who is willing to hurt his daughter and send her back to a hostile environment where she is frequently abused and degraded in order to preserve his family’s well-being rather than preserve his daughter’s health and sanity. But, isn’t she part of the family?

These gender-related ideologies are so powerful that a man is willing to dig his daughter’s own grave in order to please another man.