By Babatunde Jose
Nigerian children are vulnerable to a wide range of abuses and harmful traditional and religious practices.
The national legal framework for child protection is the Child Rights Act 2003, but to date, not all 36 states have adopted the Act. Implementation is patchy with many local authority bodies unaware of their duties under the law.
A national survey once found that 6 out of 10 children reported having suffered one or more forms of violence before reaching 18 years of age, with 70 per cent of those experiencing multiple incidents of violence. Most of the sufferers are girl children.
They are mostly the victims of child labor, illegal abduction by sexual predators and pedophiles, child slavery and forced marriage. They are also increasingly becoming victims of incestuous crimes by fathers, uncles, and male siblings.
The country has the largest number of child brides in Africa: 23 million girls and women were married as children.
Up to 2015, the official consent age in Nigeria was 18 years, until the Senate accepted among others, a law about the reduction of marriageable age to 12 years.
There are certain systems of traditional marriage within Nigeria and in some of them child brides aging 12 to 14 are treated like adult ones. In some regions of Nigeria, it was normal for brides to be only 10. However, in such cases, the consummation of the marriage happened only after the girl reached a normal adult age.
It happens often that adult men marry little girls, and their parents don’t mind because they simply can’t make ends meet and have no means to feed their little daughters any time longer.
One of the Nigerian senators, a former governor, had two child brides, aging 13 and 15.
There are no guarantees that child brides in Nigeria will be treated with such respect and carefulness. What’s more, it’s quite hard to track all the marriages that are taken in rural lands far away from the controlling institutions and child brides often suffer a lot from such marriages.
By law, adult males in Nigeria can marry girls from 12 years above. Intimate physical contacts in this situation cannot be termed illegal, however, there are exemptions to this.
For instance, if the marriage was not approved by the girl’s parents or the girl was kidnapped and married forcefully, etc. Besides, the marriage situation explained above, Nigeria’s widely accepted age of consent is 18.
A look at the age of consent in different parts of the globe is very illuminating. In Europe, the lowest age of consent is 14 in a range of countries but in most of them it’s 16. In Turkey and Malta teenagers can give their consent for intimate contacts only at the age of 18.
In the USA, different states have it between 16 and 18. They have the mentioned exemption that means no criminal responsibility for teenagers under that age who decide to have contacts with each other.
In Africa, age of consent is majorly 16. In some countries like Sudan or Liberia, it’s necessary to be married to have intimate contacts with another person in any possible cases.
In Asia, Korean people have the strictest law against occasional intimate contacts between teens, so they allow their people to have such contacts only after they turn 20. Japanese laws, on the contrary, are the most liberal and allow teens to have intimate contacts at 13.
In Oceania and Australia, the age of consent is 16. Only in Tasmania it makes 18 years of age.
In the Middle East, Bahrain has the highest threshold in the whole world, which makes 21 years. Most countries in the Middle East have this same rule: the two who are having a physical contact must be married. In the rest, the age of consent varies between 16 and 18.
In some countries of South America, the lowest consent age is 14 for all genders except for Paraguay where it’s allowed to have physical contacts since 14 for couples of different genders and since 16 for same-gender pairs. In the rest of countries of this part of the world, the age of consent reaches 18.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (among other charters and conventions) almost directly points to a prohibition against humiliating and honoring the little girls who are found in most child marriages.
However, one way or another, child marriage is widespread throughout the world, especially in Africa. Often the result of early marriage in Nigeria are high mortality, physical injuries, abuse, complications during pregnancy and childbirth.
According to data released by UNICEF, about 36% of women between the ages of 20 and 24 were married before the age of 18. Often it was, of course, a forced marriage, but there were some few cases of love marriage.
UNICEF data also indicate that more than 14 million girls annually become mothers between the ages of 10 and 14 years. The mortality rate among such young women is almost several times higher than that of women aged 20 years.
However, the most common reasons for child marriage are as follows: cultural, social, economic, and religious. Regardless of the reasons for early marriage, such marriages are very often initiated by the parents and rarely by mutual consent.
Due to poverty, low-income families sell their daughters for marriage, to cover their debts and avoid absolute poverty. However, it is the fact that girls are not educated and adequately trained and is one of the main causes of poverty in future families.
Gender discrimination is also one of the causes of early marriage. In such cultures, society devalues women and girls and discriminates them.
According to a UNICEF report, child marriage entails a whole range of problems, including domestic violence, marital abuse and food deprivation, lack of access to information, education, health care, and other social guarantees.
The world practice of early marriages shows that about 75 million marriages, among women were under 18 years. Nearly 25% were in sub-Saharan Africa.
Despite prolonged attempts to limit or completely ban such marriages, early marriage is still taking place, in many communities.
According to statistics proven by UNICEF, the number of child marriages in Africa will only increase compared to global trends.
It is also worth mentioning the fact that girls who marry before the age of 18 are often less likely to receive adequate medical care during the gestation period and, accordingly, will be more prone to various complications.
Complications are the reason for such a high mortality rate for girls who entered early into marriage.
The motive and cause of such marriages is the lack of understanding of the importance of education and the importance of the future social role of girls, which should not be limited to domestic work and raising children.
Multiplied by social exclusion, “traditions,” poverty and other factors, including geographic isolation and the presence of armed conflict, early marriage of underage girls embodies and perpetuate the vicious circle of gender discrimination and the marginalization of women.
Besides, they often face difficulties during pregnancy and childbirth because their bodies are not yet ready to bear children.
The right of girls to protection from early marriage is enshrined in various international agreements, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
Apart from the foregoing, the girl children trapped in this vicious cycle are deprived of basic education; a phenomenon we will examine next week.
However, let it be known that the girl-child syndrome is more about culture and traditions than about religion. This we would expatiate upon in the next sermon.
Barka Juma’at and happy weekend.
Babatunde Jose
