Today is Universal Children’s Day. 50 years ago today, on November 20th, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child. 20 years ago today, the General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights the Child.
These declarations and conventions are aspirational, high reaching rhetoric and are considered normatively obligatory on signatory countries. But it’s a sure bet that though these calls seem assertive in New York and Geneva, the young girl of 14 in Dhaka cannot claim these declarations as arguments that might spare her the prospect of marriage and servitude to a much older man. Indeed, the current government of Bangladesh, led by the Awami League, has not forcefully pushed the issue for politically expedient reasons; its claims to secularism have been tarnished by its near capitulation to interests that saw adding an Islamist party to its recent electoral coalition as the most direct path to victory.
Hence, I might think that Bangladeshi politicians are not likely to push through strong punitive measure that might dissuade individuals from forcing poor and debt ridden parents to marry off their adolescent daughters. I might claim that left unseen, out of sight, the government of Bangladesh will not regulate this most gruesome and hide bound practice.
So it is some relief that international NGO’s are picking up some of the slack left behind the agents of the Bangladeshi people. Plan International is helping children fight back coerced adolescent marriages by producing birth certificates that show that these young girls ARE under the legal age for marriage, which in Bangladesh, as in the United States, is 18.
Al Jazeera English ran a good investigative piece today on the phenomenon of “Child Brides” and much of the reportage is stunning in both the prospects of a solution near at hand and the humiliation that we should feel that even the most soaring rhetoric can fall to the machinations of a malicious, abusive, aged ego.
Find the You Tube piece below.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/p-0rCUTvxsk" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Please find the article that accompanies the piece above, here.
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