Forcing girls to be women: A case of forced marriages
Ayesha (not her real name), a 16-year-old girl, has been hiding for the past four years because she ran away from her matrimonial home. She was forced by her father to marry her husband.
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She said when she turned 12, her father married her off to his age mate and friend in exchange for another young girl who had been given out to her brother in marriage.
Ayesha had no choice but to ran away from her husband’s home at Yankazia to Zamashegu in the Gushegu District of the Northern Region, since her parents were not prepared to accept her back home because of the disgrace she had caused the family.
Fortunately, Ayesha has been ‘adopted’ by a policeman who got to know of her story and is now back in school.
Another girl, Fatima, also 16 years and in junior high school, said she was maltreated at home and her father had vowed not to take care of her because she had refused and reported him to the authorities when he had attempted to force her to marry at 12 years.
She revealed that her elder sister who went through the same ordeal later died after she ran away from home after pressure from her parents to marry one of her father’s friends was unbearable.
Indeed, Ayesha and Fatima’s stories are similar to that of many girls around the world, whose parents or guardians force them to marry because of poverty as well as cultural and religious beliefs.
Reports indicate that the world over, one third of girls are married before they turn 18 and one in nine girls are married before the age of 15.
If this trend continues, the fear is that about 142 million girls would be married before their 18th birthday over the next decade. This would be an average of 14.2 million girls marrying each year.
What is early/forced marriage
Early marriage refers to any union before the legal age allowed for marriage in a country. Forced marriage, on the other hand, is getting anyone into marriage against the person’s will. Usually, forced marriages are prearranged by extended families of both parties and young girls are usually the victims. There have, however, been few instances where boys have also been forced to marry.
The situation in Ghana
In Ghana, the legal age approved for any sexual activity is 16 and 18 for marriage.
Since the legal age to have sex is 16 years, most sexually active girls who get pregnant are often made to marry the men who impregnant them, although they have not attained the age to marry, 18. This accounts for most of the early and forced marriages recorded in the country.
A survey conducted by WiLDAF Ghana, Global Action and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) revealed that Ghana had one of the highest child mariage rates in the world, as one out of four girls would be married before their 18th birthday.
Also, the Ghana Demographic Health Survey in 2008 indicated that about 25 per cent of women between 20 and 24 years were married or were in a union before they turned 18 years.
Reasons for early and forced marriages
A lot of reasons account for parents or guardians forcing their young girls to marry. These reasons are deeply rooted in cultural and religious practices.
For instance, in an interview with the Regional Manager of the Islamic Education Unit of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Shiekh Armiyawo Shaibu, he said most adult Muslims wrongly believed that once a girl experienced her first menstrual flow, she was mature for marriage, regardless of her age.
Another remote reason, according to Shiekh, could be that the Prophet Mohammed married his friend’s daughter who was only nine years old, and since some parents want to follow in his footsteps, they do likewise. “But what such parents and guardians need to understand is that we live in a law-regulated regime and no matter what one’s beliefs are, it is important to abide by the laws of the land because that is supreme,” he pointed out.
“In my view, girls who are even 18 years old should not be allowed to marry because they are still not old enough to take up such responsibilties,” he said.
Another reason is the ‘trokosi system’ practised in some parts of the Volta Region where children and women are made to work in shrines to pay for the debts or crimes of their relatives.
At the shrines, the fetish priests married those young girls without their consent, depriving them of education and robbing them of their childhood.
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