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the binds of marriage

Journalist Maria Hinojosa travels the world to document the shocking practice of child marriage.

By Marissa Rodriguez

It has long been known that to be born a girl in some of the world’s developing countries is a disadvantage. Reports have surfaced of infanticide of baby girls in China, the brutal practice of female circumcision in Africa and of the use of young girls in sex trafficking in Asia and Latin America. And last month, an eye-opening documentary on PBS’s news and documentary program NOW called Child Brides: Stolen Lives shed light on what experts are calling the No. 1 uncovered international women’s issue.
Veteran journalist and NOW senior correspondent Maria Hinojosa traveled to three very different places in the world—the indigenous regions of Guatemala, Northern India and to the tribal areas of Niger—to uncover the practice of marrying off very young women, some as young as 3 years old. Her report examined the horrible, sometimes fatal, ramifications of this practice and those who are fighting back.
“We always knew this was going to be a documentary that covered a lot of territory,” says Maria Hinojosa. “We [at NOW] like fact-based reporting and following the numbers; Niger has the highest rate of child marriage in Africa, and Guatemala has another high rate, as well. It’s happening a lot in the world.”
The practice is so widespread that reportedly one in seven young women in the developing world is forced or coerced into child marriage. Today, some 51 million young girls are married; in the next 10 years, that figure is expected to grow to 100 million. Of women who are married in Niger, nearly 77 percent are under 18; in Nicaragua the percentage is 43. Though child marriage is most common in countries where fringe cultures are often isolated and resistant to change, such as Romania, Ethiopia and Kazakhstan, it exists even in developed countries such as the United States. This is evidenced most recently by the trial of Warren Jeffs, the fundamentalist minister who was found guilty of being an accomplice to rape when he facilitated the marriage between a 14-year-old girl, who has stated she was forced, and her 19-year-old cousin in their polygamist Utah community.
“We like to think that marriage is an empowered decision made by women,” says Hinojosa, a Barnard-educated, award-winning journalist and author.
But the documentary and nonprofit data reveal these young women are anything but empowered and are hardly equipped to make such a decision. They are often isolated from the outside world, are prevented from being educated and once married, enter a life similar to indentured servitude. Historically, child marriage was used in some countries to tie two families together for political or economic purposes. Poorer families used it to tie daughters to wealthier men or men from families of higher castes. However, as these communities have become increasingly urban or developed, this practice has largely fallen out of favor. Today, the practice remains popular in relatively remote locations where the tie to child marriage is largely cultural, and where the practice, if illegal, is hard to prosecute.
Among the problems these communities face are poverty, the lack of resources for young women and resistance to progress, which makes young women liabilities for their families. In fact, the countries with the highest percentage of child marriage are more likely to have high poverty rates, high levels of maternal and child mortality rates, high maternal and child malnutrition and low levels of education for girls.
“The biggest problem is that if you don’t have a place to educate girls and there is no school near you, then there is nothing to be done with you from the perspective of the community,” says Hinojosa. “So what you can do is be married and bear children.”
Hinojosa’s in-depth investigation took her on a whirlwind tour of isolated pockets of these three developing nations in search of her subjects. The Mexico City native and her female production crew sought the help of UNICEF (the global organization that has fought hard to end the practice) and local community organizations to point them to people fighting child marriage and those young women and children who have lived through it.
“I saw first-hand the physical damage that an early marriage can do to a little girl’s body,” says Hinojosa. “When you are a preteen you can go into labor for three to four days. Seeing those physical consequences will stay with me forever.”
The International Women’s Health Coalition reports that in the leading cause of death for women 15 to 19 in developing countries are complications due to pregnancy and childbirth, and the babies are 50 percent more likely to die in their first year than those of women in their 20s. Girls between the ages of 10 and 14 are five times more likely to die of these complications. Young brides are also much more likely to be physically, sexually and mentally abused. One of the reasons women are victimized by their husbands is because they were married early, says Hinojosa.
Knowing the consequences of child marriage, Hinojosa admitted that she had a difficult task when it came to interviewing parents who had put their young daughters in this situation.
“At the beginning I was really angry,” she says. “I thought, ‘How can these women do this to their daughters?’ I talked to a woman colleague and she said ‘If you are a mother with no options for your daughters, then you might be doing the best thing for her.’ So, I had to come in with hard questions without being judgmental.”
That’s a difficult task considering some of the shocking things Hinojosa personally witnessed. One of the most difficult things she encountered was in a small village near Jodhpur, where she filmed an illegal midnight marriage between two children. The bride was anywhere between 3 and 5 year old; the groom was 6 or 7. Though the children will live separately until she reaches puberty, their fates have been sealed. Hinojosa found that there are a number of organizations and brave individual souls who are battling child marriage in their communities and on a global scale.
“What’s amazing to me is that there are international organizations and local organizations that are dedicated to working with women and trying to find options for women,” she says. “Even in North India you will have a person running a private school for girls and their intent is to have women find a life outside of a child marriage.
“One of the characters that we interviewed was a heroic figure from India,” says Hinojosa. “She tried to stop child marriage and was almost beheaded and now has lost use of her hands. In India, [child marriage] has been going on for centuries and there is fear of change.” In Guatemala, she says, indigenous women working with their communities to stop child marriage also have met with resistance from people opposed to cultural change.
Keys to change for future generations is promoting education in these communities and raising awareness in the rest of the world. “If there were schools in all these little towns,” says Hinojosa, “then the problem could be cut in half.” Non-profits report that the more years of education a young girl has completed, the less likely she is to be married young.
While shedding light on the global issue and putting faces to the shocking statistics for millions of public television watchers, the documentary was also deeply personal for Hinojosa. It opened channels of communication with her own daughter and raised awareness in her own family as her film will do for many viewers.
“As a journalist my job is to put the story out there,” she says. “I would hope the viewers realize this is an issue that affects them. If this inspires them to get involved with people in this country, all the better. As a journalist if I can motivate people, that’s great.”