IT ONLY TAKES A GIRL!

     Ever since I decided to write a blog about Marriage Equality for Women and Girls I've had a lot of time to think about other issues that occur in regards to the women on this planet and marriage. I definitely thought about adding them to the first blog post I wrote about it, but I feel like it's already so long I wanted to just add a separate smaller post to address some of these issues that I forgot to add.

     Marriage can also coincide with human trafficking. For instance, in some places women or girls are actually kidnapped off the street or they could be offered a job in another city only to end up being forced to be a man's wife. This is different than child marriage, in the sense that usually with child brides the dad of the girl is the one arranging everything and she usually stays within her tribe or the area she grew up in, although sometimes she is taken somewhere else. With what I've heard before being referred to as Forced Wives, it's usually just a random woman or girl who ends up basically being kidnapped and taken somewhere else. Her family isn't involved. This seems to happen in countries in which the male to female ratio is greatly imbalanced due to either sex selective abortions or female infanticide.

     In this country we have what we call Mail Order Brides. These are women who are usually from very poor backgrounds with little to no opportunities who are desperate to get out of their country. Most of the women who come here via that are from Eastern European, Asian or Latin countries. You can imagine how desperate you must be if you are willingly to marry someone from another country that you've never met. When these women get here, because they usually don't speak the language, aren't aware of their rights, and wouldn't know where to go to access them, can easily become victims of domestic violence and enslavement. It's an issue that isn't really talked about.

     In addition to all of that there are also women who have been forced into prostitution by their husbands. This is another form of human trafficking, domestic violence and marriage combining. I think this brings up another point that in addition to championing for Marriage Equality for women and girls we also must be championing for Relationship Equality to address all the issues that women and girls face when they are dating or when they are in relationships in which they aren't married. The movie above is from a great website I recently found and the woman who runs it also has a blog which I recommend checking out and I put the link to both below.

http://www.itonlytakesagirl.org/movie.html

http://itonlytakesagirl.blogspot.com/

   
 If you want to learn more about child marriage, you can read the story below:

"Early marriage is nothing new to this family, however. Nashima, Bakul's mother, was married at 13 and gave birth to Bakul at 16.

"I was so young and I didn't know my husband, so I was afraid of him. I didn't know what it meant to have a husband," says Nashima.

This is a common scenario for many young girls in Bangladesh, where 20% of girls are married before they're 15 and 66% marry before they're 18, even though it's illegal. Around the world, some 14 million girls under 18 are married each year."


www.girlsnotbrides.org/girls-voices/facing-married-life-in-bangladesh-bakuls-story/