When in India comes the wedding season, Tatwashil Kamble’s rights activist phone never stops ringing calls to stop girls from getting married due to poverty.
Campbell said he had helped to stop thousands of illegal marriages in India, where the newlyweds were banned before the age of 18.
“The elders of the village think,” How do we dare to stop a marriage in their village! “Said Cambell, who has been campaigning for more than a decade in West Maharashra.
Many families are motivated by poverty to marry their daughters so that girls start earning their own lives.
When activists seek to stop marriages, “this has led to physical disputes,” according to Campbell.
Sometimes they are able to stop families from being held or if they arrive too late, then the bride is taken to a shelter and supported in deciding on her own future.
India is one of three children’s bride in the world, according to the UN Children’s Agency, with at least 1.5 million girls getting married every year.
Campbell said he was led by the bitter memory of seeing a teenager to die of blood loss during birth.
“Then I thought: so many young girls marry, and even after their death, it is not called a childhood marriage. They say that” the mother has died “without admitting that she is a girl.
– Wedding hotline –
Kamble operates in the Maharashtra area, an area dominated by scattered sugar cane fields, hit hard for years.
The workers said they had little choice, except to marry their daughters young – they claim to do so to protect the girl, not harm her.
“It’s not like we don’t like the idea of education,” says Manisha Barde, a sugar cane cutter that was a child herself.
“We want her to become a doctor.”
However, Barde arranged his daughter a teenager to marry just to be stopped by the authorities.
She did it because they were poor and if they had “a better job, we would not think about her marriage.”
Farm assistants said that when their children are young, relatives care for them or come to fields.
But when the girls become teenagers, their parents start to worry – either that they can start a relationship before marriage, or be sexually abused.
“There are very few girls who remain unmarried for up to 18,” said Ashok Tangde, Regional Chief of the Committee on Welfare of Children.
“I’ve seen girls who have never seen school,” he said.
Families are worried about the “safety of the girl,” said the tande, and even those who oppose children’s marriage can organize a wedding.
Tangde said his team received 321 calls from all over the children’s marriage area, which are being held or will occur in the first five months of this year.
During the peak wedding season, which lasts from October to March, Tangde said he receives about 10 to 15 calls every day, which encourages the team and other activists to attack ceremonies.
– “Do the right thing” –
Tangde has a special network of activists and other informants who help in the villages in the area, sending pictures of weddings.
“There are people who want to do the right thing,” he said.
Sometimes the bride calls directly. Another time guest calls and makes the authorities listen to wedding music.
“Breaking a wedding … there is a lot of drama,” Tangde said.
“People prepare to defeat those who go to stop such marriages.”
Joot was 16 years old when her parents married her to a 20-year-old man, ending her hope of continuing school and joining the police.
“My parents fixed it and I was not happy,” said Tarata, a mother of two students later.
Her bigger sisters were also married before they were 18, with her parents giving her the priority to obtain their only blue education.
Taratat recalls with despair how the work of the cutting cane crashed shortly after her wedding, a fate awaiting other girls.
“They have to start working as sugar cane workers that year,” she said. “Machete is ready for them.”
ASH / PJM / RSCM / CWL / FOX