The Moment of Lift

by Melinda Gates

  That was my first experience with the trauma and tragedy of child marriage.

  It’s hard to capture in a line or two the damage child marriage does to girls, families, and communities. But let me characterize the dangers this way. Equal partnership in marriage promotes health and prosperity and human flourishing. It invites respect. It elevates both partners. And nothing is further from equal partnership than child marriage. In all the ways that equal partnership is elevating, child marriage is degrading. It creates a power imbalance so vast that abuse is inevitable. In India, where some girls’ families still pay dowries (even though dowries are illegal), the younger the girl is, and the less educated she is, the lower the dowry her family often pays to marry her off. In these cases, the market makes it clear that the more powerless the girl is, the more appealing she is to the family that receives her. They don’t want a girl with a voice, skills, or ideas. They want an obedient and defenseless servant.

  Girls who are forced into marriage lose their families, their friends, their schools, and any chance for advancement. Even at the age of 10 or 11, they are expected to take on the duties of housework—cooking, cleaning, farming, feeding the animals, fetching wood and water—and soon after that, they’re expected to take on the duties of motherhood. The burdens of work, pregnancy, and childbirth have dire consequences for the child bride.

  Many years after I first heard about child marriage, I visited a fistula hospital in Niger and met a 16-year-old girl named Fati. Fati had been married at 13 and got pregnant right away. Her labor was long and arduous—and even though she was in horrible pain and needed the care of a skilled attendant, the women in her village just told her to push harder. After three days of labor, she was taken by donkey to the nearest clinic, where her baby died and she learned she had suffered a fistula.

  An obstetric fistula typically develops during a long and obstructed labor, usually when the baby is too big or the mother too small for a smooth delivery. The baby’s head puts pressure on the surrounding tissues, restricts blood supply, and creates a hole between the vagina and the bladder or the vagina and the rectum. This can lead to incontinence, including stool passing through the vagina. The husbands of girls with fistulas are frequently upset by the foul smell and the physical injury and often just kick their wives out of the family.

  The best prevention for obstetric fistula is to delay the first pregnancy and have skilled attendants at the birth. Fati did neither. Instead, after being forced into child marriage and forced into pregnancy, she was forced out of her house by her husband for a condition she did nothing to cause. She lived in her father’s house for two years until she was able to go to the hospital to have the fistula repaired. I had a chance to talk to her there, and I asked her what she hoped for. She said her greatest hope was to be healed so she could return home to her husband.

  Meeting Fati and hearing about the abused child at the train platform school were part of my early and very incomplete education on child marriage, an education that accelerated sharply when I met Mabel van Oranje in 2012, just a few days after meeting Fati.

  Mabel was one of the women who joined the dinner I mentioned earlier on the night of the London Family Planning Summit. All the women around the table talked about different issues related to women and girls, and Mabel talked about child marriage.

  Mabel, I learned before the dinner, was the wife of Prince Friso, son of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Her status gives a high profile to her work for human rights, but her activism began long before she married. In college, she sat in on the United Nations Security Council debates on genocide and became an intern at the UN. She started her first organization before she left university and spent the next decade advocating for peace.

  As CEO of The Elders, a group founded by Nelson Mandela that brings together global leaders to push for human rights, Mabel traveled extensively. On one of her trips she met a young mother who still looked like a child. She asked the mother how old she was when she married, and the girl didn’t know—between 5 and 7, she thought. Mabel was horrified, and she began using her experience, resources, and connections to learn about child marriage and launch fresh efforts to end it.

  That’s how she came to be at the dinner with me that night in London. I was highly impressed with her, even more so because she maintained her public work in the middle of personal tragedy. Five months before our dinner, Mabel’s husband had been trapped in an avalanche while skiing and was buried under a mountain of snow. It cut off his oxygen and put him in a coma. That summer when I met Mabel, she was spending time with her husband at the hospital and helping her children through their trauma while still working as much as she could on behalf of her causes. A year later, her husband died without ever having regained consciousness.

  When Mabel and I talked that night in London, she was leading an organization called Girls Not Brides, formed to end child marriage by changing the social and economic incentives that drive it. That is a huge challenge. At the time Mabel and I met, there had been more than 14 million child marriages every year for the previous ten years. One in three girls in emerging economies was getting married before her eighteenth birthday. One in nine was getting married before her fifteenth birthday.

  Mabel was the first person who showed me the connection between family planning and child marriage. Child brides are often under intense pressure to prove their fertility, which means that their use of contraceptives is very low. In fact, the percentage of women using contraceptives is lowest where the prevalence of child marriage is highest. And low use of contraceptives by girls is deadly: For girls age 15 to 19 around the world, the leading cause of death is childbirth.

  That night Mabel got my attention and became my teacher.

  From the conversations at that dinner, I began to see the many ways all the gender issues were connected, and I decided I had to learn more about each area. I left the dinner with a big earful on child marriage and a keen curiosity to know more. Ordinarily, I learn about an issue by first immersing myself in it—meeting and talking to people who live with the realities that I want to understand. Then I go back and do a deeper study of the data and talk with experts and advocates. In this case, though, I did the reverse. I started with the data. And I learned that child brides have much higher rates of HIV than their unmarried counterparts. They’re more likely to be raped and beaten by their partners. They have lower levels of education than unmarried girls. They are more likely to have a greater age difference with their husbands, which magnifies the power imbalance and often leads to more abuse.

  I also learned that many communities that practice child marriage also practice female genital cutting. I’ve mentioned this practice before, but it is deeply connected to early marriage. In cultures where it’s practiced, a girl’s genitals are cut to make her “marriage ready.” Different communities practice different types of cutting. The most severe involves not only cutting off the clitoris but sewing the vagina shut so it can be reopened when the girl gets married. Once a girl’s genitals have been cut, her parents can start looking to marry her off.

  Whether or not a girl is cut, a child bride’s wedding night is an intense mix of pain and isolation. One Bangladeshi girl remembers that her husband’s first words to her were “Stop crying.”

  If the girl’s husband lives in a different village, then she may go with him to a community where she knows no one. Some child brides have their faces covered on the journey, so they can’t find their way back home if they run away.

  Child brides are targets for abuse. A study of women in several Indian states found that girls who were married before their eighteenth birthday were twice as likely to be threatened, slapped, or beaten by their husbands.

  As the years pass, a child bride is likely to have more and more children—perhaps more than she can afford to feed, educate, and care for. With so many children, she has no time to earn an income, and the early pregnancies leave her body weak. This puts her at risk of being poor a
nd sick for the rest of her life, and perpetuating that cycle of poverty for her children.

  Meeting the Married Children

  These are facts I learned from the experts, but I felt I also needed to talk with some child brides and meet with people working to end this custom. So in November 2013, when I was in Ethiopia for a conference, I traveled to a remote village in the north of the country to see the work on child marriage being done by the Population Council.

  When we arrived at the village, two other women and I were invited into a courtyard that was a gathering place for the village; it had a tiny health clinic, a fire pit, and a small church where we would meet. There were very few people around. We brought no staff. The men with us were asked to stay back at the car. We wanted to have the best chance to hear from the girls, so we left behind anything and anyone we thought might put them off.

  We entered the church, which was very dark inside with only a few small windows letting in the light. There were about ten girls seated inside, and when my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw just how small they looked. They were tiny, like little fragile baby birds, still growing up, who hadn’t even started to sprout their wings, and they were being married off. I wanted to put my arms around them and hug them and protect them. They were 10 or 11 years old—the age of my daughter Phoebe. But they looked even younger. Half the girls were married, I was told, and half were still in school.

  I talked first to the married girls. They were so soft-spoken I could barely hear what they were saying. Even the translator had to lean in to hear. I asked them how old they were when they became brides and how they found out they were going to be married. One of the girls, Selam, told us that one day when she was 11 years old, she was helping her mother prepare for a party. She spent the whole day cooking, cleaning, and fetching water. As she told us the story, she kept pausing to take a big gulp of air, and then would continue in a whisper, as if she were telling us a secret.

  As soon as the guests arrived, she said, her father took her aside and told her that she was about to be married. This was her wedding night.

  That sent her into a panic. She rushed to the door and fought with the lock. She was desperate to get out of the house, to escape and run away. But her parents were ready. They pulled her back and made her stand silently next to her husband for the ceremony. When the party was over, she left her childhood home to travel to a village she had never seen, move in with her husband’s family, and take on her lifelong household duties.

  Each of the girls had a terribly sad story, and the saddest were ones like Selam’s, in which the girls were tricked into thinking they were going to a party. Why would you trick a girl unless you knew you were breaking her heart? Several of the girls cried when they talked of their wedding day. It wasn’t only that they were leaving their families and friends and moving in with strangers and cooking their meals and cleaning their homes. They had to leave school, and each of them knew what that meant. One of the brides—who looked about 8 years old—told me that school was the only path out of poverty, and when she married, the path closed. And they all told us their stories in a whisper. It’s hard to capture the silence and weakness in their posture, their physical presence. Some of the girls—I remember two in particular—seemed to be just shells of themselves. They seemed so defeated. They had completely lost their voices, and I didn’t see how they would ever get them back.

  I tried to hide my feelings as I was listening. I didn’t want to convey to the girls that I thought their lives were tragic, but that’s what I was thinking, and I’m sure I showed it. I just kept getting more and more emotional. When they cried, I teared up, too—even though I tried not to.

  Then I talked to the girls who hadn’t been married, who were still in school, and those girls spoke a little louder. They had some confidence, and when they talked of child marriage, I could even hear a bit of defiance in their voices. It was so clear in that moment that the girls who’d been married had been robbed of something essential—as if their growth ended when their marriage began.

  When we finished our visit and stepped outside, the light blinded me. I had to squint for a few moments before I could make my way across the courtyard to talk to the mentors. They were trying to help the young girls avoid marriage and help the married girls stay in school.

  They were doing important work and seeing promising results. But I never do a good job absorbing the details of program work right after seeing the suffering firsthand. There’s a voice in my head that says, “How can any program overcome what I just saw?” There is little useful thinking I can do on a problem right after I’ve seen its impact. The emotions are just too overwhelming.

  On our way to the airport, we were supposed to stop for tea and debrief with the team, but I couldn’t do it. I was quiet on the trip back. When we arrived at the place we were staying for the night, I took a long walk and tried to take it all in.

  Earlier in the day, as I was listening to the girls, I felt nothing but heartbreak. After I got some time and distance, I started to feel angrier and angrier for the girls who were tricked into coming to their wedding. No child deserves that.

  * * *

  In India, as in Ethiopia, there are programs working to combat child marriage that rescue girls before they’re married. The United Nations Population Fund published the story of a 13-year-old girl in the state of Bihar who overheard her parents talking about a wedding the next day. Her wedding.

  It was a shock to her. But it was normal in her community, and in almost any other instance, the story would have unfolded like Selam’s story—the girl would have resisted, but nothing would have changed. This story had a different ending. The girl in India had an app on her phone called Bandhan Tod, meaning “break your shackles.” When she heard her parents talking about her wedding, she grabbed her phone, opened the app, and sent out an SOS—a child marriage distress message—that was picked up by leaders of the organizations that make up the Bandhan Tod network. A worker rushed to the girl’s home and spoke to the parents. Child marriage is illegal in India, which gives the partners the leverage they need to intervene in a family event. The parents refused to back down. So the group leaders took the next step. They contacted the local police. The next day the deputy superintendent of police led a team of officers to the site where the wedding was under way. The police stopped the ceremony before it was complete, and the 13-year-old bride-to-be returned to her family home and continued in school.

  It’s easy for me to feel happy for the girl who escaped her wedding and returned to her family and her school. But the story itself shows how complicated the problem is, and why we need deeper solutions. Many girls being married off don’t have cell phones. They don’t have support networks. They don’t have a local police force that will come and stop the wedding. But also, and more important, when a young girl gets out of her marriage and goes back home, she goes back to the mother and father who wanted to marry her off. How is that going to work out? She has no power in that household. She thwarted her parents, perhaps shamed them. Do her parents take out their anger on her?

  It’s important to be able to save girls from marriage, but it’s more important to address the incentives that prompt parents to marry off their underage daughters in the first place.

  When a family can receive money for marrying off a daughter, they have one fewer mouth to feed and more resources to help everyone else. When a family has to pay to marry off a daughter, the younger the girl, the less her family pays in dowry. In both cases, the incentives strongly favor early marriage. And every year a girl doesn’t marry, there’s a greater chance that she will be sexually assaulted—and then considered unclean and unfit for marriage. So it’s also with the girl’s honor and the family’s honor in mind that parents often marry their girls young, so they can avoid that trauma.

  Let me pause and say what a heartbreaking reality it is that girls are forced into the abusive situation of child marriage to protect them from other abusive si
tuations. The World Health Organization says that one in three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused.

  Gender-based violence is one of the most common human rights abuses in the world. It’s also the most obvious and aggressive way men try to control women—whether it’s rape as a tool of war, or a husband beating his wife, or men in workplaces using sexual violence or bullying to belittle women who are gaining power.

  I’ve heard nauseating stories of women who have given up their dreams because they fear for their safety, who go to worse schools that are closer to home in order to avoid sexual predators. These stories come from all over the world, including the US. Until the day we end all gender-based violence, we need stronger efforts to protect women and girls. There is no equality without safety.

  In the case of early marriage, the social options of girls are so constrained by the culture that parents who marry off their girls often believe they are doing the best they can for their daughters and families. That means that fighting child marriage by itself isn’t enough. We have to change the culture that makes child marriage a smart option for the poorest families.

  A Quiet Hero

  Molly Melching has spent her life proving that point. Molly is another one of my teachers. I told you about her earlier. We met in the summer of 2012, and she showed me one of the best approaches I’ve ever seen for challenging long-standing cultural practices.

  I joined Molly in a town in Senegal, and we drove out together to a rural area to see the community empowerment program she runs there. As we spent an hour or so on the drive, Molly told me about coming to Senegal as an exchange student to refine her French in the 1970s. She quickly fell in love with the Senegalese people and culture—so much so that she decided to learn the local language, Wolof, as well.