Early Marriage
The denial of education
Early marriage inevitably denies children of school age their right to the education they need for their personal development, their preparation for adulthood, and their effective contribution to the future wellbeing of their family and society.
Indeed, married girls who would like to continue schooling may be both practically and legally excluded from doing so. •Are girls withdrawn from school to marry, or is lack of schooling for girls part of the pattern of traditional expectations and roles? Many girls stop school because of getting married. Husbands of young wives are often older men, who expect their wives to follow tradition, stay at home and undertake household and child-care duties.
Schools often have a policy of refusing to allow married or pregnant girls or girls with babies to return.
So all the rules, timetables and physical conditions make it too difficult for a girl to attend school and perform her duties as wife and mother at the same time. The removal from school of a young girl to marry, or to work in her parents’ or another household in preparation for married life, limits her opportunities to develop her intellect.
Thus, she will loses out on socializing, making friends outside her family circle, and many other useful skills. This reduces her chances of developing her own independent identity.
The most important implication of this loss is that the girl grows up with no sense of the right to assert her own point of view– and little experience in articulating one.
Lack of schooling also means that those girls and women who must work to earn a living have no qualifications or skills.
Illiterate women who are abandoned, widowed or divorced, or who are victims of growing urban poverty, are forced into commercialized versions of their work as wives: cleaning, cooking, child-minding.
They may even enter the commercial sex trade. For example, In many Latin American countries (and elsewhere), there is a strong link between very poor, women-headed households in urban areas and menial occupations– an association that will only diminish when educational levels are raised.
