Adolescents

Earlier this month – just before International Women’s Day – the U.S. Congress reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). This in itself was a triumph. However, there was another victory won that warrants special attention: the legislation includes new, groundbreaking protections for young women and girls affected by child marriage.

This is a critical step in upholding the rights of adolescent girls around the world, and in shielding them from the harmful practice of  child marriage, which often has devastating consequences for girls, their families and their communities.

Under the leadership of Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Representatives Betty McCollum (D-MN) and Congressman Aaron Schock (R-IL), who have consistently pushed for American leadership on this issue, provisions requiring the U.S. Secretary of State to author a national strategy to end child marriage were inserted to the VAWA reauthorization. ICRW and its partners in the Girls Not Brides USA coalition have advocated for the creation of such a strategy for years, and welcome the news that this important strategy will become a foreign policy reality for the United States.

If present trends continue, 142 million girls will marry over the next decade. That’s 38,000 girls married every day for the next 10 years. The costs of child marriage are high, not only for the girls themselves, but also for communities and societies as a whole. Because their bodies are not fully developed, child brides are at a very high risk of facing complications in pregnancy and childbirth – childbirth is the leading cause of death for girls ages 15-19. Young brides are more likely to experience gender-based violence, to drop out of school and to contract sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.

These staggering statistics underscore the urgency of US action to end this debilitating practice. The provisions in the VAWA reauthorization are both a welcome and a necessary step forward in the quest to ensure that this is done.

The Indian state of Haryana, a short drive from the capital New Delhi, is known for its social conservatism, a declining female population due to sex selection, and more recently, for a number of brutal rapes reported by the national media.

As I would soon learn, life in rural India is full of contrasts and contradictions. The first family I met wanted to tell me about a local unmarried heroine who at 25 took home a gold medal after winning an international wrestling competition.

“If she’d gotten married, then her concentration would have been on the household and her husband, but she didn’t, and now she’s doing really well,” Susheela, a 37-year-old mother of four daughters, told me.

Life is hard for Susheela but she still smiles a lot. She even smiles when the conversation finally turns to more serious matters: what it was like for her to be married as an illiterate child and move in with a strange family, in a strange village, miles from home.

 “At 14, what had I seen? I never even went to school – parents didn’t send girls to school back then. I came here and my in-laws said ‘work in the fields,’ so I worked in the fields. Because I suffered, I didn’t want them to do the same. I thought it would be better if at least my daughters studied,” Susheela says.

Despite this recognition, – marrying their own teenage daughters off as soon as possible remains their priority due to deeply rooted cultural norms.

The International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) is currently evaluating an innovative government program that used cash incentives to encourage parents like Susheela to delay marrying their daughters until they turn 18 – with the added hope that attitudes about a girl’s inherent value would improve. One of Susheela’s daughters, 17-year-old Kirin, is among the first girls to take part in the effort, called Apni Beti Apna Dhan (ABAD) – “Our Daughter, Our Wealth.” ICRW’s findings will be released in late 2013. 

For now, Kirin and her older sister, Heena, 19, remain unmarried, and later this year, they will have both completed secondary school. Once Kirin gets her payment (worth $350-$500) the two girls will be immediately married in a joint wedding.

The girls have ambitions to continue on to college and start a career as teachers before settling down. Yet they seemed unsure if they would be able to lead a life outside of the home, despite their parents’ desire for them to study further.

“If our parents-in-law say we can’t continue our studies or get jobs, then we’ll have to listen to them and our dreams will only stay a dream,” Heena says.

Kirin, adds “I become hopeless and my heart breaks at the thought of not going to college. Boys have all the permission, they can go, but not girls, parents are scared. We want to go to Bhiwani town to study full time. But we can’t because of ‘the situation.’”

“The situation” refers to a spate of horrific rapes in the past several months in Haryana. In one of the most severe cases, eight men raped a 16-year-old girl. The powerful Khap panchayats which govern social affairs in Haryana, proposed a solution: lower the legal age of marriage for girls. Although they do not have the authority to do so, girls fear they will incur an additional cost for this escalation in violence against them.

“It is always the girl who is blamed. One does the bad deed, and the other always pays the price,” Heena says.

There is still a long road ahead to gender equity in rural India. But the fact that Heena and Kirin will both finish secondary school, and are still living at home, signals that a generational shift has occurred. At the very least, the quality of these educated sisters’ lives will undoubtedly far exceed that of their mother. Even if it’s unlikely they’ll ever become world class wrestlers.

Jennifer Abrahamson is ICRW’s Senior Director of Strategic Communications. A version of this story appears on the ONE Campaign web site. Not Her Mother's Daughter was Jennifer's last story about adolescent girls in India.

To learn more about how ICRW is working to “change the course for adolescent girls worldwide” visit the Turning Point campaign.

Savita Singh, a slight 18-year-old schoolgirl who confesses she is poor at math but aspires to attend college to study Hindi and history, admits she has another, secret dream.

"I want to work for the Haryana police force," Savita told me, explaining that she is passionate about prosecuting families who she says abuse and sometimes even set fire to their daughters-in-law in the region. "But I know that my dream won't be fulfilled. I'm not tall enough."

Savita shared her secret with me in a cramped, dark room two days before the barbaric gang rape and subsequent death of a young woman in Delhi that caught the world's attention and sparked outrage across India in December. We sat on low charpoy beds, the wooden and rope structures that are ubiquitous in Haryana state, along with Savita's sisters, Kirin, who is 20, and Rekha, 15. High, concrete walls behind the girls were adorned with posters of Hindu gods and faraway places. Rekha and Kirin also told me about their ambitions to become teachers, to continue their studies, to wait to marry until they are ready.

While child marriage is still prevalent throughout India, the fact that the Singh sisters harbor such dreams at all may signal a subtle, generational shift in this conservative, agricultural state bordering the capital. Many women still practice a form of purdah here, hiding their faces behind a full diaphanous veil when in public or when in the company of non-blood related men. And until recent years it was extremely common for girls to marry in their early to mid-teens. Although illegal, they still do, but to a lesser degree.

One of those girls was Munni, Savita's 37-year-old mother who thinks she married when she was 15. Both Munni and her husband Amar, a soft-spoken farmer with high cheekbones, a kind face and a sixth-grade education, were determined to see all three of their daughters finish high school even if they can't afford to send them to college. Munni in particular was adamant that Savita and her sisters focus on their studies instead of working the fields.

"I never went to school because my parents had fields and I had buffalo to tend to and they said to me, 'what's the point of you going to school if you're only going to work with dung anyway? What's the point of pretending you'll be a Madam?'" she told me over hot cups of spiced chai in a modest courtyard just outside the girls' bedroom. "I feel very good that my daughters have the chance to study. Two things happen. One, a girl can learn how to speak properly – I don't know how to speak, my language is course as you can hear. And two, if a girl is educated she'll know how to manage the household accounts."

This was not the first time I heard such statements during my short visit to Haryana, where I met with a number of girls from poor families like Savita. She is among the first class of girls who took part in a Haryana government scheme established in 1994 called Apni Beti Apna Dhan (ABAD) – 'Our Daughter Our Wealth' in English. The government is now in the process of paying out bonds that were deposited in each participant's name when she was born. Today they are worth somewhere in the range of $350-$500; girls will receive them only if they were still unmarried at the time of their18th birthday last year.

The International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) is currently undertaking an evaluation of the scheme to determine its impact on this first cohort of girls. Initial findings will be published in late 2013. While the ICRW evaluation is still underway and its findings are still far from conclusive, its seems the scheme may have, at least in part, contributed to delaying marriage for some participants – even if it didn't mean a fundamental change in attitudes about a girl's value.

The Singhs told me – as did others in Haryana with whom I met – that they decided to wait to find a husband for their oldest daughter, 20-year-old Kirin, until Savita receives the cash transfer (her father was just about to submit her paperwork when we met). Marrying girls in a joint wedding is relatively common in Haryana among low-income families as it helps cut costs. The Singhs youngest daughter, Rekha, is also scheduled to receive an ABAD cash transfer after she turns 18 in a few years' time.

Amar and Munni seemed especially enlightened regarding the importance of their daughters' education. However, after speaking with them in the fading afternoon sunlight next to a couple of lazing buffalo, it soon became clear that an education was mainly so important because it means increasing the chances of finding their daughters good husbands who hold down good jobs.

In the meantime, Savita and Rekha will continue their secondary school studies, while Kirin works as a teacher's assistant in her village. Savita knows marriage is on the horizon, but she recognizes the value of living out her childhood and staying in school – even if her future in-laws, whoever they may be, won't allow her to become a policewoman, or be able to finance a college education.

"I wouldn't have liked getting married at a younger age. I would have had to leave school and take on the responsibilities of another household," she told me.

When I asked Savita if she would have been able to care for a baby when she was still herself a child, she was quick to shake her head.

"This is my time to 'eat and drink' – my time to have fun, my time to be in my parents' house. This is the time when I can do it. This is my time."

Perhaps another shift will occur when the next generation comes of age. Perhaps Savita's own daughter will have the chance to go to college or become a policewoman. Just as long as she's tall enough.

This story originally appeared on Too Young to Wed, a multimedia partnership between the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and premier photo agency VII.

The recent United States presidential election confirmed the political power held by young people. Some 19 percent of the total votes on Nov. 6 were cast by young people between 18 and 29 years old – an even greater share of the electorate than in 2008. There should be no question that young people, through their engagement, advocacy and votes, are absolutely helping to determine the future of our country.

The rise of young people's influence is not contained to the U.S. Youth are showing their influence around the globe. Half of the world's population is under 30 years old, and these youth, more than 3 billion strong, comprise the most well-informed and well-connected generation the world has ever known.

We have the fortune of joining nearly 1,000 of these youth in Bali, Indonesia this week – not sightseeing, but formulating the international development agenda for the future.

As the world heads toward the 20th anniversaries of the major international development conferences of the 1990s and the conclusion of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015, the United Nations is bringing together young leaders and experts on youth from around the world to participate in the Bali Global Youth Forum, hosted by the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Beyond 2014.

Young people and their allies from 190 countries will discuss how they – and the rest of the international community – should address the many challenges and opportunities they face. And as the U.S. Agency for International Development recently acknowledged in its first ever youth policy, how young people act on these challenges and opportunities will ultimately affect the fate of us all.

In Bali, we will chart a path forward ensuring young people's right to lead healthy lives and promote their overall well being. This includes better access to the information and services they need to prevent unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, violence, and alcohol and drug abuse. We want to change the course for adolescents and youth, who currently comprise the majority of those newly infected with HIV/AIDS, and who face far too frequent too early and unwanted pregnancy.

It is incomprehensible to us that in many developing countries, girls are forced to marry shortly after – and sometimes even before – puberty, often to much older men. The UN estimates that nearly 142 million girls will be married before their 18^th birthday in the coming decade. Young women – married or not – face increased risk of sexual violence, too early and unwanted pregnancy and maternal mortality. And young people everywhere face constraints and taboos related to their sexuality that often limits their ability to simply be themselves.

We will consider how best to provide opportunities for decent work and quality education to an ever-growing population of youth. According to the World Bank, 67 million children of primary school age and 72 million of lower secondary school age worldwide did not attend school in 2009. Without the education they need to survive and thrive in a modernizing world, young men and women will not be able to contribute fully to their societies.

Our mandate in Bali thus includes considering how societies can respect young people's sexuality, and uphold their rights, and improve gender equity and equality, while supporting youth to act responsibly on their own behalf.

As they will in Bali, young people must continue to take leadership roles and become agents of change in driving the international public health and development agenda. Not only is this their right, but experience shows us that the most effective programs and policies targeting youth are designed, implemented and evaluated with meaningful youth engagement. Governments and civil society must therefore promote and provide capacity-building opportunities, including financial and technical support, to enable young people to participate fully in decisions that affect them and their peers.

Finally, we will work toward a future where young people participate actively and take ownership in their futures, which means authentic, honest and meaningful youth-adult partnerships. Not tokenism. In fact, the vast majority of delegates at the Global Youth Forum are in that critical age range of 18 to 29 years old, when vital decisions about personal and community life are made.

Those of us attending the Global Youth Forum all hold a common belief – that empowering young people with accurate information, education and services will lead to healthy and productive decision-making for themselves and their communities. Just as important, however is our knowledge that communities, too, must support changes in social norms that will allow them to do so.

Young people around the world, including the ones who will join us in Bali this week, are the ones who can lead us and our planet toward a healthier, more equitable and more sustainable present and future. Join us in enabling them to do so.

Suzanne Petroni directs ICRW's gender, population and development program. She serves on the board of directors of Advocates for Youth and sits on the International Steering Committee for the ICPD Global Youth Forum

Meredith Waters is a senior at the George Washington University majoring in public health and was selected by the United Nations as a Respondent for the Global Youth Fourm in Bali. She is also a member of the International Youth Leadership Council at Advocates for Youth.

This commentary also appears in Global Post.