NEWSFORCED MARRIAGE

Last week, Congressional Republicans blocked a bill that would help prevent child marriage and related abuses around the world, especially in the countries where forced marriage is most epidemic. Why would the "family values" party oppose fighting child marriage, which has often been referred to as "legal pedophilia?" Mostly because of irrational fears the bill would somehow fund abortion, despite the fact that abortion is never mentioned. Don't let the GOP be the reason children continue to be sold into marriage.

International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2010 would integrate child marriage prevention into pre-existing development programs through USAID, create a national plan to combat child marriage, establish a multi-year strategy to empower girls at risk of child marriage, and require reports on human rights practices, including a description of the status of child marriage, from problem countries. If passed, it would go a long way toward giving resources to the over 60 million young girls who are already married and preventing 40 million more from being forced to marry over the next couple decades. Child marriage often means rape, abuse, denial of education, and continued inequality for women. But the child marriage act can break that cycle by empowering girls before they are forced to marry.

However, despite the fact that the bill passed the Senate unanimously, only 12 Republicans voted for it in the House, thereby failing to pass the bill. Ironically, some of he 112 co-sponsors didn't even vote for the bill. The reasons cited by the GOP were expenses (it would cost $108 million, which is less than 1% of the budget for the war on drugs) and "concerns that funding will be directed to NGOs that promote and perform abortion and efforts to combat child marriage could be usurped as a way to overturn pro-life laws." The are two main problems with these objections. The first is that while $108 million sounds like a lot of money to us, it's a pretty small amount in the world of Congressional budgets. The second is that nowhere in the bill is there any mention of abortion, reproductive health, or family planning. This bill isn't about paying for women to have abortions; it's about educating and empowering young girls to stay in school and grow up before making a decision about getting married and starting a family.

Recently, a major Islamic religious authority in Malaysia tried to pass off the marriage of a 14-year-old school girl to a significantly older man in a mass ceremony as perfectly normal. But activist organization Sisters in Islam isn't letting them get away with normalizing child marriage. They're demanding that Malaysia raise the legal marriage age to 18 to stop the harmful practice of child marriage.

The issue of child marriage in Malaysia came to a head recently when a newspaper printed an article about a mass wedding alongside a picture of one of the brides, who at just 14 was marrying a man more than twice her age. The outrage caused by the story was increased when the Department of Islamic Development Malaysia,  the body in charge of regulating Islamic principles in the country, responded that there was nothing wrong with child marriage "if the wedding is bound by love between couples.” But the question many child marriage activists are asking isn't whether or not there's love, but whether or not children can reasonably consent to a life-long and sexual relationship when they are so young. And for most of them, the answer is a resounding no.

In Malaysia, over 16,000 children, the vast majority of which are girls, are married by the time they turn 15. When girls marry young, they are less able to access education and are often completely dependent upon their husbands for all financial, physical, and emotional needs. Many young girls are forced or coerced into marrying, and some are outright sold. But Sisters in Islam recognizes child marriage as a form of discrimination against women and human trafficking, and they're demanding the Department of Islamic Development and the Malaysian government raise the marriage age to 18.

Over 3,000 people from over 700 villages recently gathered in Kolda, Senegal for one huge party. But they weren't celebrating a holiday. Instead, they were celebrating and cementing their mutual commitment to stop the practices of trafficking young girls and women into forced marriage and female circumcision in their villages. This celebration of change was the result of an innovative campaign by a local NGO to fight human trafficking with the power of peer pressure.

In Kolda, rates of female circumcision have been upwards of 94%, and forced marriages involving pre-teen and teen girls are common. But local NGO Tostan has been working to change those traditions that exploit, oppress, and traffic women. They launched a national campaign in Senegal, asking individual villages to pledge that their village would no longer practice FGM, and that all women and girls would be free to marry as adults. Then they brought community leaders from villages across a region together for an evening of singing, dancing, and publicly declaring their new policies regarding marriage. It's the community pressure of a public event with so many villages present, Tostan and other advocates hope, that will help individual villages keep their promise.

Fighting the practice of trafficking into forced marriage at the local level is a good strategy, especially in countries like Senegal where local and cultural rules and customs often hold more sway than national policies. Both forced marriage and FGM have been illegal in Senegal for years, but the practices continue, especially in rural areas. But when local village leaders support an end to forced and child marriage, they are able to enforce girls' freedom to marry (or not) within their communities and effectively fight families who want to sell daughters into marriage. And when those leaders know they made a public promise to do so in front of 700 of their peers, they have a powerful incentive not to let their village be the one that falls off the wagon. It's an incentive much more practical than the vague chance of prosecution in a far-away city.

Eighty percent of North Koreans who flee across the Yalu River and escape to Northeastern China are women. Ninety percent of those women will become victims of sex trafficking once they arrive. They flee their homes to avoid devastating poverty and an erratic, oppressive regime. But instead of finding a new life across the border, the women are targeted by traffickers and often sold into marriage. Victims who dare complain find themselves repatriated back to North Korea, where they are thrown into gulags or executed. Chinese President Hu Jintao will travel to the U.S. early next year; ask President Obama to tell him stopping North Korean trafficking into China should be a priority.

Kim Hyun-sook, a victim of sex trafficking, spoke recently with ABC News about her plight. She originally went to China to find work, and hoped to send money to her starving family in North Korea. But the broker she paid to smuggle her across the border sold her to a Chinese man for US$2,000, and she was subject to overwhelming physical and emotional abuse. Although she is still suffering from the aftermath of trafficking, she now runs the Coalition for North Korean Women’s Rights, a Seoul-based organization that helps women escape.

Hyun-sook’s enslavement is unflaggingly the rule, not the exception. According to a 2005 report, China’s disproportionate gender ratio has left many villages with few women, increasing the demand for mercenary marriage. The victims are sold to old bachelors and widowers in these villages, and in many cases, a few men from the same village pool money together to “share” a bride. Locals estimate there are 30,000 to 50,000 North Korean laborers and sex slaves in the region.

The Chinese government has no effective support system set up to deal with this kind of trafficking. Firstly, Chinese law does not recognize these marriages, leaving the women with no legal recognition or rights. Secondly, the government has a ruthless policy of returning the refugees to North Korea — essentially giving them the choice between prostitution or forced marriage abroad and starvation at home.