Ethiopian girls as young as five married off

September 3rd, 2014

This article discusses how international health services are working to minimize the growing rate of young Ethiopian girls being married off before the age of 18. There are many ethical and health problems related to this practice, which is done to ensure the fertility and virginity of these young women and to relieve the burden of another mouth to feed on poor families. The ethical problems speak for themselves, with girls as young as five years old marrying men who are much, much older than them. The health concerns of child marriage are associated with pregnancy-related death as well as contraction of STDs. Amy Walters, the article’s author, states that “girls who bear children before the age of 18 are five times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes compared to older mothers.” These young girls are 50% more likely to contract HIV, as their husband counterparts are usually older and much more sexually experienced and married couples are less inclined to use condoms, according to the Population Council. This issue is very important because if no one speaks up about this unethical practice, it will just continue to fly under the radar of the Ethiopian government which is overloaded with other problems.

Jeff Edmeades was the researcher for a project that CARE and the International Centre for Research on Women did in an effort to solve this problem. When he arrived in Amhara, he was told by government officials that the laws against child marriage virtually wiped out all traces of the practice, but when he investigated on his own he found thousands of girls within the community married off before 18. The article then goes into all the relief efforts the research team worked towards, which mostly consisted of providing an environment to educate the young women and give them a place to talk amongst themselves and become more confident in themselves.

The tone of the article was objective in my opinion but the end was left very open-ended. Though the work of CARE and the International Centre for Research on Women provided positive results, Walters ends the article by stating that many women were left behind and then diving into a story about a young woman who went to get an abortion. This confused me; by stating that many women were left behind, this article gave me the impression that this is a problem that is not even close to being solved, but by then telling a positive story about a woman finding the confidence to get an abortion because she wasn’t ready to have a child, it led me to believe that the relief efforts were successful.

I don’t think there was a bias towards the source, Aljazeera, but I do think the article left me with some unanswered questions. Walters stated that 70 documented cases of child marriages were prevented, but said nothing about what was being done to prevent future cases from happening, and the tone was both hopeful and hopeless. This article shed light on a very eye-opening practice, but I will be looking at other websites and journals with more clear indications of how child marriages in Ethiopia and other African countries are being stopped, if they are at all.