By Emma Batha, London UK
Four million girls are at risk of child marriage in the next two years because of the new coronavirus pandemic, a global charity said on Friday, as campaigners warned that the crisis could undo decades of work to end the practice.
Deepening
poverty caused by the loss of livelihoods is likely to drive many families to
marry off their daughters early, World Vision said.
“When
you have any crisis like a conflict, disaster or pandemic rates of child
marriage go up,” the charity’s child marriage expert Erica Hall told the
Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“If
we don’t start thinking about how to prevent it now it will be too late. We
can’t wait for the health crisis to pass first.”
Campaigners
said the risks were exacerbated by the fact that schools were closed and
organisations working to combat child marriage were finding it harder to
operate during lockdowns.
The
pandemic is also making it more difficult for girls to access reproductive
health services which could lead to a rise in teenage pregnancies and increased
pressure to marry.
Worldwide,
an estimated 12 million girls are married every year before the age of 18 -
nearly one girl every three seconds.
A
U.N. report last month predicted the pandemic could lead to an extra 13 million
child marriages over the next decade.
Girls
Not Brides, a global partnership of 1,400 organisations working to end child
marriage, said members were extremely worried.
“People
on the ground are saying this is looking bad. It’s likely we are going to see
large numbers of child marriages,” said Girls Not Brides chief executive Faith
Mwangi-Powell.
“This
is something I’ve heard from India, from Africa, from Latin America. Some are
saying this could undo decades of work we’ve done to reduce child marriage.”
She
said school closures were a particular concern.
“Schools
protect girls. When schools shut the risks (of marriage) become very
heightened,” said Mwangi-Powell.
“Even
post-COVID it’s likely many girls will not go back to school, which is very
scary. We need to make sure they do.”
World
Vision’s Hall said there was already anecdotal evidence of a rise in child
marriages in South Sudan, Afghanistan and India, where the charity recently
worked with police to stop seven marriage after calls to helplines.
Hall said
there were fears some people would use lockdowns to conceal child marriages,
but she expected the spike would come later as families struggle with the
economic fallout.
Parents
may marry off girls as a way to reduce the number of children they have to
support or to access dowries.
“It
really is a survival mechanism. Parents aren’t doing it maliciously - they just
don’t see any alternative,” Hall said. - Thomson Reuters Foundation
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