4-year-old violated, 12-year-old became the fourth wife of a 61-year-old man, she is still a child, please let her go!

Today is Children's Day.

When many children are happy to celebrate the holiday, two topics quietly appeared on the hot search.

One is that "the United Nations says it will take 300 years to end child marriage."

According to statistics, there are currently 650 million child brides in the world. Every minute, 23 girls become "child brides".

The second is that a psychiatrist at Peking University said that "the mental health of adolescents may have reached the worst moment since the reform and opening up."

Talking about these two topics on Children's Day is somewhat heavy.

But only by not avoiding the reality that children are experiencing can we better promise them a better future.

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On their wedding night, they die or flee

With a long history, child marriage has done great harm to children.

The childhood experience of Wallis Deary, author of "Desert Flower", is an example of blood.

She was born in the Somali desert in 1997.

When she was 4 years old, she was assaulted by her father's friend.

At the age of 5, Wallis was forced to undergo circumcision, but almost died of an infected wound.

After escaping death, she was 12 years old and suffered a child marriage.

Her newlywed partner is a 61-year-old man who already has four wives.

That night, she was almost raped, and she fled the desert with her body scars.

Later, after years of displacement, she finally became a model with the help of a photographer.

However, not all child brides have a lucky ending like her.

For example, a child bride in Yemen married a man who could be her grandfather at the age of 8.

On the night of her wedding, she died forever due to a ruptured uterus.

And even more absurdly, in 2020, Somalia passed a new law:

"Allow children to marry girls after their sexual organs have matured;

A daughter can be forced to marry with the consent of the parents. ”

In addition to Somalia, Mavira, one of the poorest countries in the world, is also the hardest hit by child marriage.

Banda, a girl from Marvira, recounts the bad customs of her hometown.

Girls who enter adolescence are sent to enlightenment camps.

The so-called enlightenment camp is more like a brainwashing base camp.

Girls are taught in camps how to please men. The community also hires men to sleep with the girls at the camp.

You can imagine what the girls in the camp will experience each night.

As a result, many adolescent girls become pregnant early and even become infected with HIV.

Banda's sister was the victim. Her sister was 11 years old when she was pregnant, and by the time she was 16, she was already a mother of three.

Teenage girls in the flower season, whose bones are not yet mature, have been reduced to fertility machines.

And this is also a common experience for child brides.

Because of child marriage, they suffer physical, traumatic and economic exploitation at an age that should have been educated.

A child bride once spoke bitterly:

"I was forced to do laundry and cook and was raped in my marriage as a child, and I suffered a series of painful blows."

We may ask why child marriage, which is so harmful to children, is it repeatedly banned.

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"Marry a young girl because she is pure"

The first is economic.

In India, for example, the child marriage rate is over 30%, with 60 million Indian adolescent girls experiencing child marriage.

This is largely due to the fact that in India, the dowry for a daughter's marriage is a significant expense, often accounting for seventy percent of the family's assets.

Hundreds of thousands of rubles are spent on many poor families.

However, child marriage can be extremely cost-effective.

The Times of India reported that an Indian father married off his 5-year-old daughter for only 5,000 rupees.

When girls are so objectified, the only thing the girl's family has to think about is to maximize profits.

As a result, many Indian child brides are getting married earlier and earlier.

Affected by the pandemic, more Indian families have fallen into economic hardship. This further stimulated them to speculate on selling their daughters.

The news that "child marriage in India has increased during the epidemic" also rushed to the hot search.

In addition to economic reasons, social customs and culture are also the soil for child marriage.

India's ancient religious codes, for example, are fully positive about child marriage. The Manu Code provides that a 30-year-old man should marry a 12-year-old girl and a 24-year-old man should marry an 8-year-old girl.

Behind these cultural practices are often extremely backward notions of gender and chastity.

For example, in a documentary filming the phenomenon of child marriage in Bangladesh, the man bluntly told the camera:

"I want to marry a young girl because young girls are pure."

The "purity" in the eyes of these men refers not only to chastity, but also to the obedience and ease of control of girls.

In fact, child marriage does not only occur in countries with backward economies and strong old customs.

In the United States, child marriage is equally high.

U.S. law also gives child marriage room to exploit loopholes.

As of 2022, only 6 states in the United States completely prohibit underage marriages under the age of 18, and the other 44 states allow underage marriages to some extent.

In most states, the legal minimum age for marriage is between 16 and 17, requiring the consent of a parent or other guardian.

To some extent, this also condones the behavior of "legal rapists" in the United States to clear their own rape charges through "child marriage".

Many underage women who were raped ended up marrying rapists.

And such absurd things are played out every day ...

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From child marriage to child depression and suicide

There is no doubt that child marriage is a heavy topic.

Because the main body involved in child marriage is the child.

They should have had sunny, healthy lives.

Just like the children celebrating Children's Day in the country today.

However, the lives of children who marry as children fall into the abyss early, and even fall into lifelong poverty.

Surveys show that child brides are also more likely to experience domestic violence, isolation, depression and suicidal tendencies.

Unfortunate children have their own misfortunes. In addition to children oppressed by child marriage, in recent years, there have been too many "tragic cases" related to children.

An early education counselor named Wei Zhun in China once said:

"Children's psychological problems are very prominent... About half of the psychiatric hospitals are teenagers. ”

These children, tormented by mental problems, sometimes swing a knife directly at themselves.

"The whole arm was covered with cuts. I asked her why she was doing this (self-harm) and she said it was because it made me comfortable. Wei Zhun said.

Where are the children here? The reasons vary.

But much of it has to do with the high pressures of school and home life.

A boy Wei Zhun knew had been locked in his home to write homework since he was a child.

His mother told him that he must get a high score, but he didn't understand what the high score was for.

All the while, he has exchanged his points for his mother's love.

Until the edifice of the spirit collapsed, he said:

"I didn't even understand that I had spent so much time reviewing math and only scored 15 points. I can't pass the exam, my life is meaningless. ”

Children's mental problems reflect family and social problems.

As one child psychiatrist put it:

"When the pressure on the system increases, the most vulnerable social group inside, the children, will be the most vulnerable."

In recent years, many of the popular involution topics on social media have been spoken from the perspective of adults.

But isn't the inner roll a red light on children's heads?

Secondly, in the three years of the epidemic, children's mental health problems have become more prominent.

A psychological counselor exclaimed: "After doing family education for so long, 2022 is an unprecedentedly serious and most concentrated year for adolescents' psychological problems. ”

According to the National Health Psychological Survey of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the detection rate of depression among middle school students is as high as 24.7%. According to a study by Nanjing Brain Hospital, the incidence of non-suicidal self-injury among middle school students nationwide is as high as 27%.

In fact, it is not difficult to find that children suffer different forms of physical and psychological harm, and there is a common reason.

It's that they are not really treated as children by the outside world.

In child marriage, they are used as commodities or sexual resources.

In a highly involuted meritorious society, they are treated as obedient, hard-working, and high-scoring machines.

But they are children.

The child is also a capital "person"!

From child marriage to broader children's mental health issues, children are not facing a world of flowers.

There are also thorns and darkness on their way to growth.

On the occasion of another Children's Day, Yimeijun called on the whole society to increase its care and love for children and see their true plight.

I hope that every child can become their true self and not pay for the desires of adults.

Happy holidays, really happy.

Resources:

Behind the legalization of circumcision, trafficking, and child marriage is a killing of ideas about hundreds of millions of women... She publishes

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Author | Small nap