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April 17, 2006

Pakistan: Muslim Child Bride For Sale

We have tried to make our readers aware of how in Pakistan, Islamic jirgas or panchayats (village courts), have condoned abuses of the rights of girls and women, Such abuses include the ordering of gang-rape against women such as Mukhtar Mai, because of a "crime" committed by her brother. We have also tried to make our readers aware of the custom of vani, where girls are promised off in marriage, as compensation for a relative's crime.

Though the custom of vani was made illegal, with honor-killing, in 2004, coming into effect early last year, the practice continues. We reported last week how even unborn girls were promised in vani marriage, as terms of a "compensation package", almost always mitigating a crime committed by a man. We also described how one 25-year old woman, Naheed Akhtar who had been betrothed in vani marriage at the age of one, was suing her father and her groom for forcing her into nikah or Muslim engagement. Naheed and her sister had been forced to become officially pledged to their "grooms" to compensate for a killing their father had committed twenty years before she was born.

As well as vani, which is commonly practiced in the central Punjab region of Pakistan, there is another near-identical custom, which is called swara. The custom of swara is common in Pashtun areas of Pakistan, in the regions adjacent to Afghanistan. The practice is still common in Northwest Frontier Province.

In 2004, an article published originally in Khaleej Times described cases from the region, such as that of Afsheen, then aged 19, who had been married off at nine years old to a man four times her age, in a swara marriage. She was given away because her father had committed a murder. "This marriage has ruined my life," she said. "It is a terrible custom. It does nothing but destroy the life of a poor girl. It must be abolished."

The concept of 'badal", or revenge, is strong in Pashtun society, and leads to a need for disputes to be settled quickly, to avoid further bloodshed. According to anthropologist Samar Minallah, the girls are treated as second-class citizens when they are sent to be a bride in a new family. "They are treated like enemies," she said, referring to the way the girls' presence reminded others of the feuds and rivalries which caused the swara marriage in the first place.

Samar recently made a documentary film, entitled "Swara - A bridge over troubled water" in which she states that the stigma of being in a swara marriage lasts until death, and many child brides forced into swara marriage contracts commit suicide when they reach maturity.

An article by Amnesty International states that Pakistan ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Child in 1980, prohibiting child marriages. Under Pakistan's Muslim Family Law Ordinance, a girl must reach 16, and a boy must reach 18, and both must give consent, before a marriage can take place.

But children are often sold in marriage. Prices for brides range from 80,000 rupees to 200,000 rupees ($1,340 to $3,350 US), and though illegal, they are used as ways to supplement incomes. In March 2004 in Sindh province, a man was charged for selling his 7 year old daughter to a 35 year old man for marriage. The daughter had tried to escape, but Ali Hassan, her "husband" kidnapped her back.

Today, Pakistan's Daily Times documents a shocking case, which involves both the selling of a child bride in a market, and the girl then being given away in a swara marriage. What makes the matter more humiliating for Bibi Jan, the thirteen year old girl, is that when she was presented as a bride, she was then rejected.

Bibi Jan was purchased in a market, the Nothia bazaar in Peshawar. The people who bought her were looking to find a girl as a result of a decision made by a jirga in Rusthum, in Mardan district.

This jirga had decreed that the family of Afsar Ali of Shahbaz Gari should provide a girl in compensation to the family of Gul Sanga, who lived in the same village where the jirga was held. The reason for the compensation was that a girl from Gul Sanga's family had eloped with a male member of Afsar Ali's family. Afsar Ali did not have a sister or another close female relative to give away, he was ordered by the jirga to buy a girl.

A cousin of Afsar Ali, called Sajjid, bought the girl from Nothia bazaar for the sum of 53,000 rupees (888 dollars). When 13-year old Bibi Jan was then presented to the family, they rejected the girl, demanding that they be given a "healthier" girl.

The family of Gul Sanga claimed Bibi Jan was mentally upset and a minor.

The local police are being blamed by Samar Minallah for the current incident. Minallah, who runs the Ethnomedia organisation, is still an active campaigner against swara marriage. It would have been officially outlawed at the same time as Vani, a ruling legally effective as of one year ago. But Rakhshanda Parveen, from the non-governmental organisation Sachet, describes swara as a "culturally-sanctioned practice of violence against women".

For girls to be given away in marriage is a crime against their human rights, especially when this is done to exculpate a male relative's crimes. To sell a girl into marriage is a denial of her human rights. But for a girl such as Bibi Jan to firstly be sold, and then offered up for a marriage with a stranger, when she is not even out of childhood, is a sign of the backwardness of Pashtun society. In rural communities of Pakistan, girls and women are treated no better than livestock, chattels to be bought and sold, and forced into breeding with people who are not chosen of their own volition. And then, swara marriage condemns them to be treated as creatures of shame.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at April 17, 2006 1:15 AM

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Posted by: Silvester at April 17, 2006 5:12 AM

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