07/09/2012 TheWashington Post
When I arrived in Maradi, a sleepy town in southern
Niger, I knew immediately that it would be difficult to find victims of forced
child marriages. This region has one of the highest rates of such unions in the
world, but efforts by the government to curb them had driven the centuries-old
practice underground. Parents had become reluctant to publicize child
marriages, fearing they could face a jail sentence.
When I spoke with the head
government child protection officer in Maradi, she informed me that she had
heard of only one recent case: a 12-year-old girl who jumped inside a well and
severely injured herself after learning that her parents was going to marry her
to a much older man.
The family lived in a village about a two-hour drive
away. But when we reached there, the girl said she was 17, and her parents and
tribal elders claimed she jumped into the well because she was mentally ill. It
was a dead end. So we drove back to Maradi.
But I knew that the practice was so widespread, that
if I spoke with enough people, knocked on enough doors, I would find cases. I
enlisted the help of local agencies working with abused children, the child
protection officer of the United Nations Children’s Fund, and visited the
regional hospital. Over the next four days, we managed to find the girls who
are portrayed in today’s story.
Balki Souley is one of the 25,000 girls under the
age of 18 who are married every day worldwide. According to the Thomson Reuters
service TrustLaw, the
top 10 worst countries for child marriage, by percentage of women 20-24 years
old who are married before they reach 18, are:
1. Niger, 75 percent
2. Chad, 72 percent
3. Mali, 71 percent
4. Bangladesh, 66 percent
5. Guinea, 63 percent
6. Central African Republic, 61 percent
7. Mozambique, 52 percent
8. Nepal, 51 percent
9. Malawi, 50 percent
10. Ethiopia, 49 percent
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