Underage marriage is a serious issue addressing most underdeveloped countries. It has been and still is a main problem faced by young girls in our own country. It plagues most of the far-flung rural areas of Pakistan, and although steps are being taken to finish off this atrocity, to believe that it has been removed from society completely is to delude yourself in an awful way. Underage marriage has become a way of survival for economically undeveloped families all across the country, as it has been for decades now.
The philosophy of the need for child marriage is, by our standards, outdated and fundamentally wrong, but try explaining that to a family with seven children and depleting funds. It has become an endless cycle: parents marry off their child, usually a female, by the time she is "of age" which in rural areas is around ten, maximum twelve years. Poor thing, she has no choice in the matter, and she is from that moment onwards no longer a free female, but a slave for her husband and his family, to clean the house, take care of chores, cook the food, work as a servant to earn more money and, of course, to have children. Many children, to make sure that there are more working hands, and, to send more people out to earn the daily bread. And when the females of this lovely dysfunctional family are of age, they are married off, which saves more money to be spent in the other children and so on and so forth until it becomes a traditional way of life, a normalcy. Never mind the will of the girl, she is hardly old enough to understand what's going on, and never mind religious limitations, it is all allowed as long as it suits the family's needs. Education is a faraway concept, hazy and something never even in the peripheral vision. The girl herself is never treated like an actual human being, with hopes and dreams and ambitions, but an object, not allowed to live her life and stuck with a distorted, traumatized childhood, especially if her husband happens to be a forty something year old.
