This project is highly involving for anyone who feels committed to fighting for the rights of the weakest. The group I belong to has joined Girls Not Brides and is strongly motivated. So, the monitoring centre for the safeguarding of equal opportunities (Onerpo) chaired by Aura Nobolo, is among the organisations fighting for this principle of civilisation.
Working in partnership through social networks, we disseminate the group’s aims and initiatives on the Facebook page "No more child brides" (#maipiùsposebambine).
Based on the network shares we immediately realised that there is considerable sensitivity on the part of men and women who, like us, hope for decisive action at all levels, both national and international, so the common project to abolish child marriage in every country in the world is fully achieved.
Child marriages in Mexico. The story of Itzel married at 14 years old
Itzel met Jesùs when they were children. She liked him and fell in love with him at 14, when he was a handsome boy of seventeen, as happens to lots of girls, all over the world. But this was Mexico and adolescents often get married at a very early age. According to United Nations information 6.8 million Mexican citizens are married before age 18.
Itzel married Jesús, convinced by her family that this was the best thing to do for the good of them all. But the girl didn’t know her choice would affect her for the rest of her life.
She left school and stayed at home to do the housework and look after the animals.
Her life was spent in loneliness, in a small house, with a little bit of countryside around it.
The days were monotonous and tiring, lived with little enthusiasm and no smiles; lots of duties, very few rights. But nobody could take away her right to dream: to imagine her life could be different, to remember how carefree she was before, when she could go out, go and see her friends, joke with them, go for walks, go to school.
Itzel remembered that at one time she had wanted to be more informed and educated, learn a profession and have a job; but now she was just a goat keeper.
As she ate her frugal meal alone, Itzel was sad and would have liked to tell all young girls: “Think very carefully before you get married. Above all, remember to study. I regret not having continued my education now and I wonder if life will ever give me another chance. I would so like to go back school".3
Not really fully understanding the problem of child marriage, Itzel experienced it first-hand and realised she had precluded any possibility of personal growth for herself. She therefore decided to follow the advice of a former classmate and turned to an association to obtain logistical support to get out of that situation. She was welcomed and helped so she was able to attend some training courses, regain her self-esteem and start to think of a better future.
The Girls Not Brides organisation, which is present in Mexico as everywhere else in the world, is very effective at supporting these lost girls who don’t know who to turn to. Often in the villages, acquaintances and family members tend to convince the girls that theirs is an unavoidable fate, while in actual fact they are only adolescents or very young girls with their whole life ahead of them.
Without help they certainly couldn’t do anything but submit to the wishes of their relatives, and this is why the associations’ work is increasing significantly. The measures to assist these girls begin with a preventive action, aimed at preventing them from being forced to leave school to get married. This action is aimed at families, with meetings in the villages, where all the dangers that arise from child marriage are explained and described. Through documentaries, examples and direct testimonials the parents are made to understand that pregnancies at a very young age entail many dangers. The risks that girls face when they give birth to a child before age 18 are explained to them, ranging from spontaneous abortion, infant mortality, to serious health consequences during and after pregnancy.
The commitment of the activists of the humanitarian associations is constant, and is targeted at very poor families who live in rural areas of Mexico such as Chiapas, Guerrero and Veracruz, where without support they would have absolutely no chance to improve their condition and understand that 40% of the population married at an early age represents a human problem that weighs on the entire social economy.
Nujood, the courage to divorce at 10 years old
“I want a divorce.” This was the unpredictable declaration of a little girl who stood before the judge and expressed her intention to free herself from the noose of her marriage.
Nujood Ali, born in a small village in Yemen in 1998, is co-author of a book about her story translated into 17 languages, and is the youngest divorcee in the world.
Because of the family’s poverty – when the girl was only nine years old – her father accepted a marriage proposal of a thirty-year-old. So Nujood Ali was forced to leave school to be a wife. She left her family and went to live with her groom.
She cleaned the house, spending her days between daily sexual violence alternated with beatings, which her husband didn’t spare her even in the presence of his own mother, who, not only did not defend her, but supported the man’s right to do what he wanted to the little girl’s detriment.
Nujood Ali was only ten years old and only recently married when she decided she had had enough. She wanted to escape the harassment of a husband in his thirties who had taken away the disenchantment of being a child and made her fall into a kind of hell.
It was a woman in her family who helped her, giving her precious advice. Dowla, her father ‘s second wife, who told her to run away and go in search of a law court.
So she ran away. Having reached a court she asked a magistrate to help her. A complaint was lodged and in the meantime Nujood Ali was housed in the home of another magistrate who then asked an association that fights child marriage to intervene.
The centre’s activists, supported by a lawyer, started legal proceedings that would be an example to many other girls in the same conditions.
Nujood Ali went against her own family, who made her marry to obtain a modest dowry from her betrothed, and at the same time get rid of a mouth to feed at home.
The lawyer Chadha Nasser, who defended Nujood Ali free of charge, accused her husband of having broken the law by raping the little girl, and her father of having lied about his daughter’s age.
During the debate Nujood Ali refused the judge’s proposal to return to her husband after an interval of five years. She couldn’t stand that man, or his family, any more.
Nujood Ali got a divorce. It was the 15 April 2008. Her story is told in a book entitled “I am Nujood, age 10 and divorced” written by Nujood and the journalist Delphine Minoui.4
The book, distributed with huge success and translated into 17 languages, was made into a film by the director Khadija Al Salami, a victim herself – a former child bride – of an identical fate and a similar escape from a tyrant husband.
Nujood Ali’s story is personal and intensely narrated against the background of a rural environment in Yemen, similar to many other developing countries where the rights of girls and women are not recognised; where it seems that nobody pays any attention to the pain a little girl feels when, deprived of her childhood, her dreams, her plans for a happy life, she finds herself a prisoner of a man, in a house, a place, that all darken her very existence.
The book and the film on Nujood Ali are at the same time a warning and a journey of hope towards a better, freer, more humane and just society, without abuse and bullying at the expense of the weakest. A society open to total change to achieve the dream of many little girls: a society where everyone has rights. A society freed of poverty and the need to sell its own children.
Khadija, also a child bride, before she became a successful film director
Khadija Al-Salami, was born in 1966 in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen. At 11 years old she was forced to marry a man of thirty, but did not accept what she experienced as an abuse; and it was, despite her tribe and her family considering marriages between little girls and adults of even thirty or forty years older, legitimate and normal.
The child refused to have sex with her husband and he returned her to her family, as if she were damaged goods.
One day Khadija plucked up all her courage and decided to be the protagonist of her own life, to get divorced and choose to make herself a better person, possibly a happy one.
She ran away from her husband, went to an association for the protection of women, which helped her find work at a local TV station. It was the start of her recovery, her entrance into a work environment that she liked very much and that was to mark the course of her studies, her work and her success as a director.
A providential scholarship, won at 16, helped her achieve her objectives. She went to study in the United States and graduated with top marks in Film Production and Directing.
Then she went to live in France, where she began her career as a documentary filmmaker. She has made dozens of films on the role of Yemeni women and girls.
There have been many rewards in recognition of her commitment in defence of child brides. She was nominated as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by Frédérick Mitterrand, Minister of Culture and Communication at that time. She has received accolades from many institutions including the Foreign Legion.
Her film "I am Nujood, age 10 and divorced" won an award at the International Film Festival in Dubai in 2014.
Khadija Al-Salami, is the first female Yemeni film director and stands for the commitment and courage of the women of her country. She is an example for all the girls who do not wish to submit to cruel, old fashioned, rural customs which out of ignorance trample their basic rights to live in freedom without being abused.
Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Prize girl
Malala is convinced that girls are entitled to an education. She was ten years old when the Swat valley, the District of Pakistan where she lived, was attacked by the Taliban that abolished the right to study with the closure of many schools, including her own.
Malala described life under Taliban rule in a BBC blog using the pseudonym Gul Makai. It was 1999. The girl began several collaborations with major newspapers, including the "New York Times", where she expressed her disagreement with Taliban rule, opposed to education for all Pakistani citizens, especially women.
She on the contrary loudly affirmed during interviews: "I want to go to school, I want to play, listen to music, sing!".
In 2012, she became a Taliban target.
"Which one of you is Malala Yousafzai?” was the question she heard, but didn’t have time to answer before two gun shots hit her head. Two armed men had boarded the school bus that was taking her home, with the intention of killing her for having written in her Urdu blog that women have a right to education.
Malala’s topics were considered obscene by the terrorists who claimed responsibility for the attack with these phrases: "This is a new chapter of obscenity which we must put an end to… she has become a symbol of western culture in the area, which she has openly touted… she considers Obama her ideal leader. Let this be a lesson to her".5
In the telephone claim to responsibility for the attack, Ehsanulla, the Taliban spokesman, threatened a new ambush if Malala survived.
Malala indeed hovered between life and death, but she managed to survive. She was transferred to a hospital in Great Britain and recovered. She then decided to remain in the U.K. with her family, to continue her studies and devote herself to her campaign for girls education.
She's tough. She was brought up with a good education at home. Her father Ziauddin, a poet, and a teacher at the Khushal Public School, is of a progressive and emancipated mentality. He has always taught her the value of education ever since she was little and has shown a desire, on several occasions, to see his daughter go into politics one day.
The confidence Malala’s father had in his daughter’s talent encouraged the girl to engage in social activities which she divulged through blogs and the net. So she began to receive awards and new assignments.
She won the National Youth Peace Prize, conferred on her by the Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and was subsequently nominated for the International Children Peace Prize.
On 12 July 2013, on the occasion of her 16th birthday, she wore a shawl that had once belonged to Benazir Bhutto, to speak at the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York and made an appeal for the right of every boy and every girl to education.
In November 2013 Malala was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
President Martin Schulz defined her as 'a global icon of the fight for girls’ education".
Moved, Malala said: "I hope that through our unity and our determination we can achieve our goals and help the 57 million children who expect something from us, who do not want an iPhone, xbox, PlayStation or chocolate, but just want a book and a pen."
Malala’s growth programme was set to achieve its highest levels, when beaming, in 2014, she announced on Twitter that she had been admitted to Oxford University: "I’m very excited," she wrote. She was happy to achieve her dream of being able to study. On her website www.malala.org, through a non-profit organisation, she collects funds for educational programmes throughout the world.
On 10 October 2014 Malala was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with the Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi. She was seventeen years old and the youngest winner of a Nobel Prize for the struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.
The story of Aberash. The courage to change
Aberash was 14-years-old, a teenager, when she was kidnapped by a 29-year-old farmer who took her to a hut and brutally raped her.
The man’s intention was to force her into marriage. He hoped to get her pregnant and make use of the rule derived from telefa, which according to ancient tradition makes kidnapping socially acceptable when the misdeed is followed by a wedding to put things right.
The girl, however, had no intention of yielding to such an imposition, nor to overcoming the affront she had suffered.
She was left alone in the hut and when her kidnapper left, promising to return soon, she realised there was a gun in the house. It belonged to her tormentor who used to hang it on a hook. Aberash, who hated that prison, took the gun and fled.
Her kidnapper returned home and realised that the girl was not there, so he looked for her with some of his friends. He found her and tried to grab her, but she wriggled free, then she fired the gun and killed him.
The story took place in 1996, in Ethiopia, in a rural area, many hours journey away from the capital Addis Ababa.