In all the buzz about Narendra Modi’s promotion of #selfiewithdaughter, what seems to have been overlooked is one bar baric form of discrimination that millions of daughters continue to suffer in this day and age. It’s child marriage, which affects the upbringing of daughters and pushes them into situations long before they are physically and mentally capable of handling them. India’s own statistics admit that one in two women is married before turning 18.

There are several states where girls were married before they reached 15 years of age among Scheduled Castes in 2011. Bihar leads the pack with more than 30,000 girls below the age of 15 years married off that year, according to Census figures released on Thursday.

Just as Nirbhaya galvanized public opinion against rape, Phulmonee did so against child marriage, way back in 1890. An 11-year-old girl in Bengal, Phulmonee died of hemorrhage from a rupture of vagina caused by her adult husband who had forced sex on her.

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Prohibition of Child Marriage Act (PCMA):

This grim diagnosis was made by the Law Commission in a report submitted two years after the enactment of the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 (PCMA). For, lawmakers had not mustered the courage to invalidate child marriage as such. Despite the usage of the term “prohibition” in its name, all that PCMA actually does is to make child marriage “voidable”.

Rather than treating child marriage as void, as demanded by feminists, PCMA allows the child bride to repudiate it after becoming an adult. Couched in a gender-neutral language, Section 3 of PCMA states that “child marriages shall be voidable at the option of the contracting party who was a child at the time of the marriage”.

Far from seeking “to stop a child bride from living with her husband and from being sexually abused”, PCMA, as rightly put by the Law Commission, “lays the foundation for such an abuse”. It said, “The adverse health consequences and the violence faced by the girl child below a certain age are factors which outweigh certain ‘social’ considerations in not invalidating the marriage.”

Also Read: 10 Ways An Indian Woman Is Expected To Change Post Marriage

Negative Impact on Women and Girls:

The Modi Government‘s failure to undo this lapse of its predecessor is ironic given its highpitched rhetoric on the girl child. After all, there is nothing unexceptionable about the resolution which regards child marriage as a human rights violation having “a disproportionately negative impact on women and girls”.

Activist Bharti Ali, who has worked extensively on child marriage, says that “the poor use of PCMA is because of the reluctance of daughters to take any legal action against their parents“. Hence, the need for the Government to promote enforcement of the child marriage law, besides of course tightening it.

Source: The Times Of India