MINGORA, Pakistan: Eleven years ago, Hadiqa Bashir’s life took a drastic turn when her parents arranged her marriage to an elderly taxi driver, influenced by relatives. Despite child marriages being common in her conservative Pashtun family in Pakistan’s northwestern Swat Valley, Bashir resisted. She sought help from an uncle and even threatened to report her parents to the police.
Now 22, Bashir has devoted her life to combating child marriages. In Pakistan, 19 million girls are married before the age of 18, the sixth highest number in the world, according to UNICEF.
“When you experience something yourself, then you understand it, you know the pain,” Bashir told Arab News at her office in Mingora, Swat District. “An incident happened in my life that led me to start a campaign against child marriages in Swat.”
In Pakistan, the legal age of marriage for females is 16, except in Sindh province where it is 18. Financial hardships push many poor families to marry off their daughters young to reduce household costs or because they see marriage as the best option for girls with limited educational opportunities in remote areas. A patriarchal society, conservative social norms, and pervasive gender inequality also fuel child marriages.
Experts highlight that child marriage impedes girls’ rights to education and health services, particularly in rural areas. It adversely affects their physical health, emotional well-being, education, and future prospects. It exposes them to risks such as early pregnancy, domestic violence, and limited personal and economic development opportunities, stripping away their right to make decisions and perpetuating power imbalances.
“The situation is very grave,” Susan Andrew, a child protection specialist at UNICEF Pakistan, told Arab News. “Child marriage often leads to early pregnancy before girls’ bodies are fully ready. We are witnessing very high rates of infant and maternal mortality.”
Andrew added, “The target should ultimately be that no girl is married before eighteen in Pakistan.”
This is Bashir’s mission. In 2021, she established the non-governmental organization, Girls United for Human Rights, to campaign against child marriages. She says her NGO has reached 90,000 of the 1.4 million women and girls in Swat Valley to raise awareness against this practice.
“I WAS LUCKY”
With a population of 2.6 million, Bashir’s NGO estimates that around 20,000 adolescent girls in Swat could become victims of forced marriages. Swat is globally known as the hometown of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl shot by the Taliban in 2012 for advocating for girls’ education, who later became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
“In my own family, my aunt was married at 11-12 years of age, and my grandmother insisted that I should be married at 11, taken out of school, and taught household chores,” Bashir recalled.
“I was lucky that my uncle told me about human rights and the Child Marriages Restraint Act. I bravely stood up to my grandmother, the first girl in my family to do so, and told her that I didn’t want to marry. I wanted to continue my studies.”
Bashir’s campaign against early and forced marriages is supported by international bodies like UNICEF, community leaders, and religious clerics.
“We are getting very positive results through awareness campaigns,” Dr. Saeed Akbar, a community elder working with Bashir in Swat, told Arab News. Akbar shows families photos of young brides who died during pregnancy or childbirth to highlight the medical side effects of child marriages.
“We show them records and photos and say, ‘See, this is the issue. If you keep marrying your daughters at a younger age, you may face these problems,'” he said. “Now, 70 percent of people understand this, while 20-30 percent need more time, but our efforts are ongoing.”
Fazal Rabbi, a prayer leader in Swat, also speaks out against child marriages in his sermons, emphasizing that there is “no place for child marriages in Islam.”
“If a child is given better education and training and married after reaching the legal age, this will be beneficial for them,” Rabbi told Arab News. “She will be able to take better care of her children’s education and training, as well as her home.”