The Impact of Covid-19 On Child Marriages In India

–Kakali Das |

A report by UNICEF reads, “10 million additional child marriages may occur before the end of the decade.” A list of major problems causing child marriageshas been listed out by it. According to this agency, 100 million girls were at risk of child marriages before the Covid-19 outbreak, and now there’s an additional 10 million child marriages that may occur because of the pandemic. Worldwide, UNICEF has estimated that 650 million girls and women alive today were married off in childhood, half of those occurring in Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Ethiopia and Nigeria.

India made significant gains on ending child marriage in the previous decade; child marriage has been reducedfrom around 47% by 2005 to about 26.6% by 2015. Despite all the decadal gains that India had in reducing child marriage, it still carried a large burden of child brides of the world. Every third child bride globally was from India. What Covid-19 has done is that it has threatened this momentum on the reduction of child marriage globally, and especially in India. India, along with some other major countries accounts for half of the 10 million estimated increase. “We saw this corroborate a lot during the lockdown; our partners reported instances of many child marriages happening, cases that we were and weren’t able to prevent”, Tanisha Dutta, Child Protection Specialist at UNICEF said.

In June, the Ministry of Women and Child Development said that they had approximately prevented 900 child marriages through child-line during the period of lockdown in between April to June. In addition to the impact of the increased risk of child marriage, girl children have experienced impact of Covid-19 disproportionately – there is also the lack of mobility that has affected girls more than boys, gender decide in the access of digital resources, corresponding lack of access to education, increased risk of gender based violence and mental health issues. A lot of students such as adolescent girls have corroborated some of these impacts – concern about mental health, inability to meet friends, seek help and support on any issues that they have faced; it has vastly compounded these overall impacts on girl children in the country.

As the global report has pinpointed a few of the reasons behind it, I would delve a bit deeper in some of them –first being the continued lack of access to education. As per the figures in India in the pre-covid19 times, almost 50% of the girls had dropped out by the time they reached class 10, meaning 6 million girls are out of school already. The lockdown extended school closures (in many places are still closed or opened partially), and thus a lot of children, especially girls are pushed to the brink now, with families as a coping mechanism resorting to their early marriages. It has also restricted girls’ aspirations to a great degree. The other point that the report has highlighted is the “economic shock” – poverty is akey driver for child marriage, and we have seen it pan out in India. The situations that we have had in the pandemic, the economic shock that the families have experienced have increased manifold. A negative coping mechanism will translate into issues of this kind such as, early marriage, higher incidences of child labour and therefore trafficking, family’s inability to cope with the stress and anxietyresulting in higher punishment etc.

As the data of the National Family Health Survey(NFHS-4), 2015-16, the rural rates of child marriages are much higher than urban, of about 32% as compared to 18%. It’s mostly a rural phenomenon which is driving child marriages a lot. Not only in the states like Rajasthan, West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, but also within some seemingly developed states like Tamil Nadu, Telangana or Andhra Pradesh, child marriage rates are very highly prevalent, and to be able to shift the needle in reducing child marriage, prioritising work in these states is utmost important.

‘Education’ is the only way, I believe, to ensure the reduction in the rate at some point. A great deal of evidencehas been witnessed worldwide as well as in India of the close linkage between keeping girls in school longer and the reduction of child marriage. This very construct is now threatened, since the avenues such as schools where the girls are encouraged to go are closed or put to a halt. And for them to continue to transition from elementary to secondary levels to higher education which delays the age of marriage are now suddenly restricted for many families.While many children are engaged in digital education, a lot of them in digitally dark areas aren’t able to access it. While they were already at high risk of dropping out from school, the prolonged closure of schools further de-incentivises the parents from sending their children to school. The thought of investing in new devices or internet connection for a school that anyway the parents aren’t very convinced about continuing their daughters in is the least they’re concerned about. Overlaying this with ‘economic shock’ that the families are dealing with, and the need for families to re-coop their finances, the negative coping mechanism very often results in girls getting married at a tender age.

“What our partners have told us is that many families, during the lockdown, thought that it would be cheaper to marry off their daughters, since dowry won’t be a problem as long as the lockdown persists. Many adolescent girls during consultations have expressed these fears with us”, Tanisha Dutta further said.

The very measures that one adopts in a pandemic in order to contain the disease are also the measures that are increasing the vulnerability of children – discontinuation of schools, therefore being unable to flag teachers about any concerns they have, halt in the access to services such as children protection services which could otherwise check in on them via a distress call. These grievances redressal services provided a blanket for a lot of abuses that happen, whether its child marriage, gender based violence, child labour etc. If the recovery plan to the pandemic doesn’t take into account these after-shock impacts on children, we would lose an entire generation of these children owing to these stress factors.

“Our recommendations are firstly on having comprehensive social protection measures. Families need to be supportive to have cash transfer programmes and to ensure that they are able to access and leverage scholarships or any income aids out of the rehabilitation packages available. More importantly our experiences have shown that merely cash transfers alone won’t work; it has to go hand in hand with other services needed to be made available for children –mental health programmes, skilling and employment services – resulting in them being able to foresee a future for themselves while continuing education; there needs to enable environment for communities in order to understand the ill effects of child marriage etc. These are the baskets of interventions that UNICEF is suggesting”, the Child Protection Specialist at UNICEF said. She further mentioned that the lesson learned for UNICEF during the pandemic was that ‘child protection services’ don’t count as essential services. As a result, they weren’t able to function in an ideal manner during the lockdown. As children’s vulnerability gets compounded in any kind of emergencies, the key advocacy point for UNICEF now, as per the Specialist, is to make child protection services available as emergency services.