Kenyan marries off underage daughter to afford new wife - paper
Thu, 29 Sep 2011 12:00 GMT
Kenyan Maasai girls, rescued from being given away for marriage by their fathers, raise their hands in class, January 1999. REUTERS/Corinne Dufka
By Katy Migiro
NAIROBI (TrustLaw) - Government authorities have rescued a 13-year-old Kenyan girl whose father married her off so he could raise funds for his own second wife, the Star newspaper reported on Thursday.
In Kenya, parents receive a bride price when their daughter gets married. Traditionally, this is regarded as a way of compensating parents for the money they have invested in raising their child.
But poor families often marry off young girls – who are otherwise regarded as an economic burden – as a way of generating wealth.
The girl’s parents turned up at her boarding school in drought-stricken Turkana, demanding to take her away, according to the report.
“The father claimed that he had used the bride price to marry another wife and the girl must accept to stop learning and become a wife because he could not return the bride price,” Wilson Korombori, a local education officer, told the newspaper.
The payment is usually in the form of livestock, which is highly valued by pastoralist communities in Kenya’s arid northern lands.
Kenyan girls as young as 10 are often married to men five times their age, rights activist Stella Kanuri told the paper. In Kenya, the legal age of marriage is 18.
FGM LINK
Child marriage is closely linked to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), which is illegal in Kenya but continues to be carried out with impunity.
“As long as there is FGM, there will be early marriages,” said Dennitah Ghati of the Education Centre for the Advancement of Women in Kuria, close to the Kenya-Tanzania border, where 87 percent of girls do not finish high school.
“After girls undergo FGM, they are immediately married off to older men, old enough to be their fathers.”
In Africa, 42 percent of girls get married before they turn 18, according to a 2005 U.N. report cited by the Star.
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu is spearheading a campaign called Girls Not Brides to end the abuse.
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