Thousands of little girls in Southeast Asia and the Pacific have found themselves an economic burden and have been married off. This is reported by The Guardian, citing a study by Plan International Australia.
According to the authors of the study, marriages with children are mainly concluded for one reason: as if girls need too much money to feed them, so in a crisis period – for example, an economic downturn amid the COVID-19 pandemic – it is easier to give them out early get married. In 2020, Save the Children estimates that at least 250,000 adolescent girls in Southeast Asia and the Pacific could face early forced marriage over the next four years.
“And after that, when they get married, girls are considered adults. As a rule, this is where their education ends … Their job becomes to be a mother and wife,” said Suzanne Legena, CEO of a charitable organization for gender equality. (Susanne Legena). Plan International Australia’s study also highlights the importance of girls’ secondary education and details the risks and long-term consequences of forced early marriage.
According to Plan International, in the first half of 2020, the number of applications for marriage with minors in Indonesia was more than two and a half times higher than the same figures for the whole of 2012. In 2020, about 33 thousand girls were married.