habana, a 16-year-old resident of a slum adjacent to Sarfraz Colony, a posh area of Faisalabad, says she spent her childhood as a part-time maid doing cleaning work in various houses. These days, she is unemployed.

Three years ago, her family married her to a 30-year-old man from the community who had returned to Pakistan after spending some time in Saudi Arabia.

She is the fifth among eight siblings. Her three elder sisters were also married at a young age. The two younger sisters are working as cleaners with her mother. Her eldest brother works in a barber shop. The youngest brother is six years old.

According to Shabana, her life was not a bed of roses even before marriage but, after the marriage it got tougher. “My husband had told my family that he did not expect a dowry and that he would get my elder brother a job abroad. After the marriage, I found out that he had been expelled from Saudi Arabia for not having a permit,” she says.

Shabana’s husband works off and on. She has to run the household as well as earn a living. “My first child died,” she says.

These days she spends most of her time at home. She has to do household chores and take care of her second child. She says she has to face domestic violence from her in-laws. “First, my family’s poverty robbed me of my childhood. Then early marriage locked me up for life in a prison with no way out. At such a young age, I am unwell most of the time” says Shabana.

Muhammad Wasim, a 28-year-old is also a victim of child marriage. He was forced to marry his elder brother’s widow after he died in a traffic accident. At that time Wasim was a middle school student.

Wasim says that he had no idea at that time how marriage at such a young age would affect his life. “When my friends and teachers at school came to know about this, they started making fun of me. Some teachers used to talk to me about it. It made me feel embarrassed,” he says.

A few months after the marriage, he had to leave his education and start working as a daily wage worker in a power loom factory to finance the household.

“My father had already passed away. After the death of my brother; I had to take up a job to provide for his two children as well as my mother and wife. After my marriage I also want to leave school on account of the way fellow students and teachers made fun of me,” he says.

According to Wasim, his mother and other family elders decided to marry him to his brother’s widow so that their three-marla ancestral house would not be divided. He said the decision made life meaningless for him.

“My childhood and youth have been spent worrying about the financial needs of the family. It seems that the rest of my life will be spent the same way,” he says.

According to the Pakistan Demographic Health Survey 2017-18, 13.5 per cent of girls and 2.6 per cent of boys in Pakistan are victims of child marriage. According to this survey, 3.6 per cent of girls in the country get married before the age of 15; 18.3 per cent get married before the age of 18.

Afshan Tehsin Farooqi, chairperson of the National Commission on the Rights of the Child, says that child marriage affects both girls and boys, but the number of girls affected by child marriage is much higher than that of boys. “It is a common trend. Poor families marry off their daughters at a very early age. They consider girls a burden because of education and other expenses,” she says.

Farooqi says Pakistan signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990. The convention says that marriage under the age of 18 is a violation of the human rights of children. “It blocks children’s education and can ruin their health. It denies them opportunities to move forward in life,” she adds.

Amjad Latif, advocacy and communication manager of Rahnuma, a member organisation of the Family Planning Association of Pakistan, which provides free health and family planning services to women, says that 80 per cent of women who receive medical facilities from the organisation come from poor families. Most of them face health problems due to early marriage.

According to Latif, girls affected by early marriage are frequently victims of sexual exploitation. They are also unable to take proper care of their reproductive health. He says that if the government introduces a financial support scheme to ensure the provision of education to girls from poverty-stricken families, most child marriages can be prevented.

According to a joint research report of UN Women, a United Nations organisation working for women’s rights, and the National Commission on the Status of Women, a national organisation working to improve the condition of women in the country, Pakistan has a high incidence of child marriages. It ranks sixth in the world. There are more than 600,000 child marriages in the country every year.

According to the report, early marriage not only affects individuals, but also hurts the national economy. According to this study, the rate of child marriages was 23 per cent between July 2019 and June 2020. This caused a financial loss of $800 million to the economy.

The report states that due to the high mortality rate of children born due to early marriages, the national economy suffers an annual loss of Rs 636 billion.

In addition, 631,000 female students were deprived of education due to early marriages. Of these, 360,000 were from the Punjab, 136,000 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 170,000 from Sindh and 28,800 from Balochistan.

14 per cent of the cases of domestic violence in the Punjab were attributed to early marriage. The rate was 42 per cent in Sindh, 53 per cent in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and 50 per cent in Balochistan.

An annual increase of 21 per cent in the birth rate of children and 22 per cent in the death rate of children was attributed to early marriages.

The report states that child marriage causes a 21 per cent reduction in women’s participation in labour force and an indirect annual loss of Rs 26.8 billion in wages.

Neelofar Bakhtiar, chairperson of the National Commission on the Status of Women, says that the NCSW is working on legislation to set the minimum age of marriage at 18 across the country.

She also calls for increasing fines and penalties for child marriages in the Child Marriage Restraint Act. “We have convinced the Council of Islamic Ideology to allow legislation in this regard. The Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights has also approved it. For the sixth time this bill will be presented to the National Assembly for approval,” she says. “The NCSW is working in consultation with stakeholders at the national level and raising public awareness about the negative impact of early marriage on the lives of girls.”

“Child marriage has a huge negative impact on girls’ autonomy, education, employment and health. It affects their decision-making power, increases dropout rates from schools and reduces their participation in economic activities,” she says.

She says that the elimination of early marriages would increase the literacy rate and labour force participation of girls, reduce the rate of population growth and reduce the burden on the national economy.

The writer has been associated with journalism for the past decade. He tweets @ naeemahmad876