T

he kidnapping of girls in Nigeria, who have been reportedly married off to their Boko Haram captors, remains a shocking crime; after two years, the girls are still missing. Yet democratic Indonesia, whose president is on a tour wooing Europe, allows the marriage of 16-year-old girls — even while the child protection law states children are those below the age of 18.

Last year, the 1974 law on marriage was upheld by the Constitutional Court — which turned down a request to raise the minimum legal marrying age for girls to 18. Among the plaintiffs’ arguments were that child marriage contributes to Indonesia’s high maternal mortality rate, the highest in Southeast Asia at 395 deaths for every 100,000 live deliveries, underweight newborns and preteens who are unequipped physically and mentally as wives and mothers.

But there is no process to revise the law as we commemorate Kartini Day on April 21 to honor the heroine credited with improving women’s standing.

A study released on Thursday by NGO Rumah Kitab reported findings from Banten, West Java, South Sulawesi, West Nusa Tenggara (NTB) and East Java — not only confirm earlier studies, including that poverty and parents’ fear of their girl becoming an “old maid” drive communities and families to marry off girls barely out of high school.

The team under noted scholar Lies Marcoes also reported that all studied areas where child marriage was rampant were areas where communities and families had been deprived of their land and other resources. The causes are not only “voluntary” sale of land for daily needs and education, pilgrimages or lavish ceremonies, but also imposed changes on land function for infrastructure, factories and plantations. Such areas saw men and women leaving for cities or going abroad as migrant workers, leaving children in the care of elders and other family members.

Household responsibilities were shifted to girls in the family, not the fathers who stayed at home, and many resorted to marriage, as they could no longer bear the responsibility of taking care of the household, the report said.

In Lombok, NTB, elders were quoted as saying that child marriages were now more frequent than in the days of their youth.

Worse, religion has increasingly been abused to justify child marriage — not only by clerics who spread fears on the sin of extramarital sex — but also by the Constitutional Court.

Adults prioritizing children’s wellbeing are the exception. Nyai Dewi Khalifah, who leads a pesantren (Islamic boarding school) in Sumenep, East Java, is one educator who does not drive girls out of school when they become pregnant or get married.

Ending child marriage requires ending abuse of religious teachings, but, more importantly, the state must no longer facilitate statutory rape, as stated in the Criminal Code.

A humane Indonesia can have no place for cases such as that of the cleric Syech Puji, who married nine year-olds under the nose of the police and Semarang authorities. Neither can we have the state endorsing child marriage, and children being allowed to have children.