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Child marriage: A silent, deadly alarm
Following failed attempts to raise the legal age of marriage, for girls it is still 16, while it is 19 for boys.
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Child marriage could end girl’s education, destroy their health and put them at risk of violence. (Shutterstock/File)
T
he northern part of Lamongan in East Java witnesses the migration of its residents to many regions. They become migrant workers both within and outside the country, or sell the regency’s famed delicacies — pecel lele (catfish) or soto (soup) — at food stalls from Sabang in the archipelago’s western tip of Aceh to Merauke, Papua in the east. Some of the men work at cement companies or as factory workers. Those who stay behind rent and cultivate state-owned land (tanah persilan) or work as sharecroppers. They leave in the morning and return home in the evening, taking the youngest children with them, but leaving the teenagers at home.
For survival, virtually all the adults have left the villages, leaving parents to worry about their teenage children’s social interactions. Pressure on teenage girls to marry young becomes unavoidable.
There are many cases of unplanned pregnancy, but there should be some other solution other than early marriage. Research by Rumah KitaB Foundation in 2016 across nine regencies in Java and South Sulawesi found 53 young women who married under the age of 18, 36 of them because of unplanned pregnancies. Following failed attempts to raise the legal age of marriage, for girls it is still 16, while it is 19 for boys.
This picture of Lamongan, with variations elsewhere in the country, illustrates the changes in living space that have encouraged child marriage. Other factors include “protecting morality”. Permissive social interactions without education on gender and reproductive health on the one hand, and increasing fundamentalist religious views with a purely textualist approach to sexuality on the other, leave adolescents with restricted space and very few options. This leaves one common piece of advice for them: get married now.
