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Struggle for Children’s Rights

Decent Essays

“I want a permanent divorce,” this is a saying of a 10-year-old wife - who was suffering from child marriage (Worth, “Voices Child Marriage Yemen”). Child marriage is a terrible scenario for children, especially for little girls. They are forced to marry, before they are mature enough due to social norms, traditions and their family members, whom they are depending on. According to statistics in 2013, in Bangladesh, the child marriage prevalence under the age of 18 is 66%. 240 among 100,000 child wives died, when they gave birth. In Niger, this figure rises to 75% and 339. In Chad, this figure is 68% and maternal mortality rate rises to 1100 (UNICEF State of the World’s Children 2013, Table 9: Children Protection, Council on Foreign …show more content…

That means society has to suffer because of increasing abundance of illiteracy in a population. Because child wives are not received enough education. Therefore, they are unable to take a job because of lack of necessary skills and knowledge. It “maintains their [child wives] low societal status and makes their families vulnerable to an intergenerational cycle of poverty that hinders the development of their communities” (“Child Marriage”). Also, child marriage causes the decreasing of the number of skilled labors that is about to participate in economic activities in local and even in national level. Therefore, the economic growth is slowed down exponentially. The changes and renew in the laws to prevent child marriage should be done to make society develop and help little girls improve their values and social status. Although child marriage causes many serious problems for the society, process of preventing from child marriage is not easy.
Protecting children from child marriage is problematic and in long-term scale. Although people are struggle for fight child marriage off, there are many hindrances that prevented the process such as cultural norms, religious belief and poverty. Besides, conservatives in the places of child marriage practicing, of course, may also want to argue that although government has already enacted the laws to prevent child marriage. It still happening due to people’s altitudes and beliefs. In

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