Every year in India millions of little girls and adolescent girls are married off by their parents before they turn 18. Unicef estimates that this concerns 27% of them, one in four. Figures that decrease with the years but which remain dramatically high and which are at the origin of the fight of Radha Pandey, 16 years old, living in the region of Jharkhand, in the north-east of India. As she tells in Times of India, last spring, her father arranged with the parents of a boy from a nearby village to marry her. Without warning her. Except that Radha eventually found out. She had already told her family that she didn’t want to get married until she was of legal age, that she wanted to study, become a school teacher and then marry, so, unable to convince her father, she went to see that of the teenager, begging him to cancel the preparations.
This 16-year-old from Jharkhand first stopped her own child marriage. Now she’s fighting for other children around her. pic.twitter.com/xOvcaV034F
– Brut India (@BrutIndia) October 20, 2021
At the same time, she contacted a child protection association, which advised her to alert the authorities. What she did. And for good reason, the law is on its side: in India, child marriages have been prohibited since 1929, in 2006, the law was strengthened to punish with two years in prison parents who do not respect the minimum age of 18 years old. Yet the tradition continues. Because that always leaves one less mouth to feed, because often the mother, the grandmother and all the women in the family have been married like that. This is what Radha heard himself say. But she insisted and ended up convincing the boy’s father, put off at the idea of going to jail, to give up. The marriage was therefore annulled and since then Radha Pandey has become her district ambassador for the Children’s Foundation against forced unions of underage girls.
झारखंड की बहादुर बच्ची राधा ने बड़े दुखी होकर कहा था, ”मैंने सबसे लड़कर अपना बाल विवाह रुकवाया, तब से मेरे माँ-बाप मुझसे बात नहीं करते।“ मैंने अपना फ़ोन नम्बर देकर बोला, ”बेटी वे तुम पर गर्व करेंगे।तब तक तुम मुझसे बातें कर सकती हो। “कल कोडरमा के कलेक्टर ने गाँव जाकर उसे सम्मानित किया। pic.twitter.com/PoWzwmjFS1
– Kailash Satyarthi (@k_satyarthi) July 4, 2021
Brides-to-be come to her for help and advice. She also does prevention in schools in her district, informs adolescent girls about their rights, reminds families of the penalties incurred and lists the damage caused by early marriages: girls are more easily abused by their husbands, they drop out of school and waive any qualification.
In nine months, Radha succeeded in having about 20 underage marriages planned in her district annulled. And she’s not alone, as every month in India at least one teenage girl makes the headlines for saying “no”.