Media Analysis- A bride at three

I was flicking through the pages of Grazia magazine the other day and i came came across an article that really struck a chord in me. There was a picture and article about a little girl called Sunam from Afghanistan. At the tender age of three, Sunam has already been betrothed to her seven-year-old cousin. Dressed up in a veil, white dress, with hair and make-up done, Sunam has been given as a gift from her father to his sister, who is desperate for a daughter of her own. When questioned about her engagement party this summer, she fiddled with her dress and looked blankly at her family,not out of shyness but out of the fact that she is unable to talk much. Sunam and her fiancee now live together as siblings but when they reach their mid-teens they will get married. This situation is a regular occurrence in Afghan where statistics from UNICEF show that 16 per cent of children are married by the age of 15, especially those from poorer families. The poverty of recent years has shown that the marriage age in some areas has lowered below 15. To read this is such a shock when we come from such a free nation with so many choices. The match is made by the children's parents and often results in a miserable union for the rest of their lives. Sunam will grow up and be considered the property of the groom's family.Her future looks set to be little more than a slave who will cook, clean and have children for her husband. Often the wives are subjected to violence, if she disobeys her own family in the union or her grooms family once she is married. The man can also take a second wife if he loves her, according to both Afghan and Islamic culture. The girls are trapped in these marriages and it is very common for them to run away or commit suicide. In the cases that they run away they often end up involved in drugs and prostitution as the only way to support themselves. The minimum legal age of marriage in Afghanistan is 16 for girls and 18 for boys, however this is often overlooked and child marriages account for 43% of all marriages. Often the brides family is happy to receive a larger some of money for her at a younger age rather than wait a year or two.
There are several organisations trying to improve the situation in Afghan and lobby for more rights for women. In March of this year, the woman's ministry and rights group Medica Mondiale started a campaign to encourage marriage registration before a judge in the hope that this will cut down the amount of forced and child marriages. The realisation that this is going on in our world is not something that we are exposed to every day, however with a little research it is a subject with much depth and an ongoing issue with which girls younger than ourselves must deal with everyday. For more information on this subject go to www.womenforafghanwomen.org and www.medicamondiale.org.