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Stolen childhoods: Child Brides in Ethiopia
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Millions of girls around the world – some as young as five years old –find their fates sealed by early marriages. We travel to Ethiopia – the country with the highest rate of child marriage anywhere in the world – to live life with a child bride.
Millions of girls around the world, some as young as 5 years old, find their fates sealed by early marriages.
00:00:00
We travel to Ethiopia, the country with the highest rate of child marriage anywhere in the world, to live life with a child bride.
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Sariye Todes always thought she'd be going to school at this age, always thought that she would have years before she had to take care of and be intimate with a man.
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But her school days are over. At 12 years old, she has already been a wife for four months.
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On the day her childhood ended, her mother lied to her. She told her she was preparing for an Easter celebration. That's not what it was.
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I believed her, but then I asked her again and she revealed that I'm getting married the next day.
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Marriage was the last thing Sariye expected. She didn't know what it meant, but she was sure she didn't want it.
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All I said was, if you want to ruin my future. I didn't feel anything. I didn't laugh. I didn't cry.
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But her mother, convinced she couldn't provide for her after the death of Sariye's father years earlier, had arranged for her to marry.
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I never met my husband before I married him. I didn't even recognize him on our wedding day.
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He is unseemly good.
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Sariye is just one of the estimated 50 million child brides across the world.
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This is a story of what it's like to live a life you never asked for, to have your childhood stolen.
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Sariye's day begins at sunrise when she cleans the hut she shares with her husband.
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She doesn't go to school, but watches every day as her friends leave without her.
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I feel so angry when I see my friends going off to school. It hurts.
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Hurts as she realizes that every day that passes is one more day with no education.
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One more afternoon spent preparing food and cooking lunch.
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She and her husband sit down together in total silence.
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More than 30 minutes pass and not a word is spoken.
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Dusk falls and the wind picks up.
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Dinner comes and goes and again silence.
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In this, the Amhara region of Ethiopia, an estimated 1 in 5 girls marry before their 10th birthday.
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Nearly 40% are wed before the age of 15 and some are married as young as 5 years old.
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Catch girls young. Catch them young before they get too smart, before they start asking too many questions.
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That's the logic in the region, says Helen Mdem-Mikail of the United Nations Population Fund.
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It's a problem related to gender inequalities.
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She should not be highly educated as much as a boy and she should be subservient to a man.
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A man like Jebewa, Sariye's husband, a farmer and a man 10 years older than she.
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But Jebewa says it's not a marriage of romance for him either.
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I decided to marry her because there was no one to cook for me.
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To get someone to do that, I needed a wife.
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In return, he says he'll provide Sariye with security.
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Security perhaps, but there may be a price to pay.
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Sariye says what bothers her most of all is what happens at night.
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I cried the first day I had sex because I didn't know what it was supposed to be like.
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It's not good to get married so young because the girl is forced to have sex with her husband and she will be hurt.
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And if she gets pregnant, there may be devastating consequences as her body may be too small to safely give birth.
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In fact, pregnancy is the leading cause of death for girls between the ages of 15 to 19 in the developing world.
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Despite all of this, early marriage remains a tradition vehemently defended by many of Amhara's village elders.
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I believe in getting married young. That marriage should be arranged for children.
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It's ingrained in our society. The society believes in this.
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But long-standing tradition is no excuse for what's happening to the girls of Ethiopia,
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says the country's Minister of Health, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
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Because it has been there in our culture for long, it doesn't justify that it should be with us for the future.
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The government did pass a law in 1998 forbidding marriage before the age of 18.
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But the law is facing its own difficulties.
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I think having the law is one thing and enforcing it is also another thing.
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Governed by custom and culture, few local officials and community members actually enact and adhere to the national law.
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And so, for many girls, running away from their marriages is the only escape.
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Up to 20% of girls who migrate to urban areas do so to flee such a future.
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And that's what happened to 17-year-old Yeshi Mekri.
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My family wanted me to marry when I was 8 years old, so I escaped to the nearest city.
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Like so many other girls, she left a quiet rural village and found herself in a dangerous city with few options.
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She began working in someone's home, but that didn't last long.
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I began working as a maid, but a broker soon found me this job.
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A broker sold her to a brothel.
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She's now a prostitute working in a red-light district.
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She sleeps with up to 30 men a night and her income just $5 an evening.
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Next to her bed, Yeshi keeps posters.
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This one, she says, represents her childhood.
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This one, her present.
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There's no easy answer.
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If I knew I would work like this, I would have preferred to get married.
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That's something Sariye, trapped in her own marriage, may find hard to understand.
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When I was very young, I never wanted to get married.
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I wanted to have a full life.
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And while the life she has may be unlike the life she imagined,
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she still dreams of something different for her future children.
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And she's getting support from the most unlikely of places, her husband, Jebewa.
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If I have daughters, I want them all to go to school.
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I want them to have a different future than the one Sariye and I have.
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In an effort to protect child brides and sex workers against unwanted pregnancies
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and the spread of HIV-AIDS,
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the Ethiopian government and the United Nations Population Fund
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are making contraceptives and obstetric care available to girls across the country.
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- Idioma/s:
- Niveles educativos:
- ▼ Mostrar / ocultar niveles
- Nivel Intermedio
- Autor/es:
- United Nations (Naciones Unidas)
- Subido por:
- EducaMadrid
- Licencia:
- Reconocimiento - No comercial - Sin obra derivada
- Visualizaciones:
- 786
- Fecha:
- 26 de junio de 2007 - 15:46
- Visibilidad:
- Público
- Enlace Relacionado:
- 21st Century Television Series
- Duración:
- 00′ 14″
- Relación de aspecto:
- 4:3 Hasta 2009 fue el estándar utilizado en la televisión PAL; muchas pantallas de ordenador y televisores usan este estándar, erróneamente llamado cuadrado, cuando en la realidad es rectangular o wide.
- Resolución:
- 320x240 píxeles
- Tamaño:
- 52.24 MBytes
