Campaigners like Shakuntala Verma have had their arms severed by attackers who oppose her brave fight to stop child marriages in India.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/01/news/india.php
**India’s effort to stop child marriage hits a wall **
By Amelia Gentleman International Herald Tribune
While India has been waging a campaign against the traditional practice of child marriage, many people here consider it a failed, half-hearted effort. The government’s defeat has been symbolized by the image of Shakuntala Verma, a 48-year-old social worker who lies in a hospital, both arms crudely severed above the wrists. Verma believes her limbs were slashed by a local villager, angry at the work she was doing in rural Madhya Pradesh, a state in central India, to prevent about 20 child weddings from going ahead. “I’d been visiting families in the village, going into their homes and trying to persuade them against marrying their children,” she said. Calm and articulate, as she recuperated after a 16-hour operation to rejoin arteries, bones, veins and nerves, she explained: “I wasn’t welcomed by the villagers. Parents hid their children and lied about their ages. There was a lot of anger about my presence there. I’m quite certain that the attack was connected to the work I was doing.” Eager to improve its poor record on child marriage, the state government increased pressure on its grassroots social workers this year, demanding that they take greater responsibility for underage marriages. Verma was given a list of local families who were thought to be planning weddings for their children on May 11, an auspicious day for marriage. She spent 10 days trying to explain to the locals why this could prove harmful to their children. “The youngest child was 10, but the average age was around 15 or 16,” she said. “Although the parents were not willing to listen, I kept trying to explain to them that we wanted to help the children have a better future. The response was not very good.” Verma was at home alone on the eve of planned ceremonies in Bhangadh, a remote village in the west of the state. The children had already been anointed with ceremonial dabs of tumeric, a final preparation for marriage. A man she did not recognize arrived and hacked at her head and arms with a knife, leaving her hands hanging by threads of skin and flesh. The police say there is no firm evidence to connect the attack with the issue of child marriage. Nevertheless, Verma’s case has been the trigger for an analysis of why the government is failing in its mission to combat the countryside’s adherence to early marriage.
Statistics are elusive, but estimates are that 40 to 50 percent of marriages in India involve a girl under 18 or a boy under 21, the legal ages for marriage. According to Unicef, 82 percent of girls in Rajasthan, where the practice is particularly widespread, are married by 18; 15 percent of girls in rural areas across the country are married before 13; and 52 percent of girls have their first pregnancy between 15 and 19. Child support agencies catalogue the dire consequences that follow early marriage, particularly for girls: The child’s education is sacrificed; girls become more vulnerable to domestic violence and are weakened by early pregnancies; and babies born to girls under 17 are 60 percent are more likely to die during their first year of life. Unicef describes child marriage as a “gross violation of all categories of child rights.” The government appears unwilling to crack down on the practice with any great energy, however, and its ambivalence toward the issue is echoed with equal lethargy at every level. “People have never taken this issue very seriously,” said Jaya Sagade, the author of “Child Marriage in India,” published this year by Oxford University Press. “No political party has taken proper action against it; neither has anyone in the legal fraternity. There’s a sense that it won’t be possible to uproot such an entrenched custom.” The law itself is weak. Parents can theoretically be sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, but they very rarely are; a survey in 2001 found that there were never more than 89 attempted prosecutions across India in any one year. Although the act of marrying children is against the law, the marriage itself is valid once performed, even if the child was as young as 5 at the time. The police do not have the authority to arrest anyone about to take part in a marriage, and the bureaucracy involved in preventing one is so complicated that most weddings have already gone ahead by the time the papers are ready. Premlal Pandey, the inspector general of the police in the Indore region, where Verma was attacked, said his officers were reluctant to interfere. “We have limited manpower, so we have to decide where the thrust of policing should be,” he said. "Mostly we choose to be active in the criminal field. If we intervene in child marriages, we get enemies; relatives get extremely angry. Legally, we may be correct, but we are not welcomed by society because most people do not consider this to be an evil. “We can’t arrest people, so the only choice is to use force. What does force mean? Well, violence. Yes, beating. It’s extremely difficult.”
For every argument that child-welfare agencies produce, parents have a counterclaim: it makes economic sense to marry off all the girls in one family in order to avoid the cost of multiple weddings; finding a husband swiftly for a girl removes the burden of feeding and educating her; and marriage relieves parents of the responsibility of preserving a girl’s honor throughout adolescence. Some parents argue that girls who are married off very young are not dispatched to the husband’s family before puberty, an argument Sagade dismissed. “Even if it’s true that the girl remains at home until reaching puberty - which I don’t believe is usually the case - puberty is usually around 12 or 13, which is still far too young to be ending childhood,” Sagade said.