Child Mariages Essay example

Submitted By EVe-lo
Words: 1867
Pages: 8

Child marriage is a common practice in many countries around the world. Marriage should be a time of celebration and joy but for many children around the world they are forced into marriage before the age of 18. These marriages are often performed without the consent of the girls involved in the marriage.For some of these children marriage could mean life or death. An eight year old girl named Rawan from Yemen died of internal injuries after a few days being married. She was forced to marry a man five times her age.The big question is how can we stop child marriage? Or can we stop it? One reason that I’m really interested on writing about this topic is because I knew a girl in Haiti that went through child marriage. Back then, during the 1990’s child marriage was common in certain part of the countryside in Haiti, she explained to me. She was about 15 years old when her parents forced her to get married. The guy whom she married to was 5 times older than her. At the time she had no choice but to marry him but inside she felt like she was dying. The husband was very abusive, both physically and verbally abusive . Also, he was jealous that’s why he kept her prisoner in the house.She was not allowed to see nor contact her parents because the guy wouldn’t let her to.She couldn’t have friends, so she was just a miserable person.
One day, the guy went to work on plantation farm and as usually he gave her a firm order not to leave the house and do all the chores. In the beginning, he used to threaten to kill her if she ever try to escape or try to contact her family. He even threatened to kill her parents if she ever decided to escape, so that’s the reason she never thought about escaping because she knows the consequences. The day that they guy went to work he said he would be back before midnight.When they guy left, she started having flashback of all the things that the guy did to her she finally decided to escape. She didn’t even take any of her clothes because she was such in a hurry to leave. The distance between where she lives and her parents was about 2 hrs. Luckily, while she was waiting on the side of the road for someone passing by to give her a ride somebody pulled over and ask her if she needed a ride, and of course she said yes. Finally, she made it to her parents house. When she got there her parents were so happy to see her but she told them that she is in a run and if they could borrow her some money, but they didn’t have money to give her. So the person who gave her the ride volunteer to drive her to the city of Port-au-Prince. She told me after arriving at Port-au-prince she went through a lot because she was homeless and had nowhere to go. She didn’t have any relatives at Port-au-prince. After going through all those stuff a rich family found her on the street and she told them her story and they decided to adopt her. Now, she lives in Port-au-prince she got married with a nice guy and she has two beautiful children.Reflecting back on her story made me think how lucky this girl was to escape such a terrible thing. If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t never though such thing was going in certain part in Haiti. The good thing is the child marriage is not common anymore in Haiti, it has stopped since the 1990’s.

Another reason I wanted to write about this topic I didn’t know that in other country child marriage still existed in the 21st century until I saw a recent documentary about child marriage in a village of Congo, Africa. I was shocked to know that child marriage still exist in other part of the world. I wanted to know more about it.My passion from this topic came from this documentary and I said to myself I have to do more research on it. I decided to do a research paper on it to show others that child marriage still exist. It makes me really upset when I know that somewhere around the world children are getting forced to get married and their right to go to school and get an education are stolen from