Reports find social media and online dating exposes at risk girls to child marriage

ABC NEWS (Australia)

A report by the humanitarian organisation plan international has found that social media and online dating exposes at-risk girls to child marriage Susanne Legena is the CEO of Plan International Australia. She says the research finds that technology is allowing girls to choose their own partners -- but are still susceptible to child marriage.

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00:00through whatsapp and facebook they are meeting partners what what the report shows though is

00:08that while it might be a digital door it's still leading to the same trap often resulting in girls

00:15being exploited all their poverty situation being exploited for marriage sometimes what the girls

00:22told us is when their relationships are found out by their families they're put under pressure to

00:28marry sometimes it gives them the illusion that they're making choices rather than their parents

00:33are but then they find themselves in situations with that power imbalance and their poverty meaning

00:39that they feel exploited forced to drop out of school or result in teen pregnancies which impact

00:46the rest of their lives what did your report find in terms of how much this is happening and where

00:50it's happening you know we don't have great data about how many of these are occurring via social

00:56media but we know that 12 million girls are married before the age of 18 around the world that's one

01:01every three seconds this report um talked to 250 girls from 15 different countries 14 countries where

01:08it's actually illegal to be married before you're 18 about their experience and they largely told us

01:13that it was a depressing experience a third of them told us that they were already divorced or separated

01:19from the relationships that they'd formed one in 10 talked about the violence that they experienced at

01:25the hands of those relationships that were formed before they were 18 and many of them regretted losing

01:31um the chance to be at school and felt isolated from their friends and felt a stigma in the society if they

01:38chose to opt out of marrying and you met a so-called child bride in cambodia what was her story

01:45um i met a um a young woman in cambodia she actually wasn't married she was a 21 year old girl who

01:53um had chosen not to marry and was a shining light in her community as someone who would study to be a

02:00teacher but at 21 she was considered ancient because almost everyone in her community was married at 14 or

02:07or younger um so the problem in some of these contexts is people have no um examples of anyone in their

02:14community who is not married and they have no um options available to them so the example of the

02:20woman that i met in cambodia was a young teacher who was acting as a role model and a shining light to

02:26both the boys and girls in the school that there were other options beyond getting married before the

02:31age of 18 and that you could be valued in the community by contributing economically beyond your

02:37bride price also suzanne do vulnerable at-risk girls understand what online grooming is and what

02:45red flags to look out for absolutely not and in many of the contexts where we're talking about there are

02:51few regulations or laws the laws have not kept up with the digital forms in which people are now

02:57meeting and certainly their parents generation have no access to that technology and are not in a

03:02position to be able to teach them or guide them in that way so you're finding girls being groomed not

03:07being able to recognize those signs are putting themselves in extraordinary danger so how can the

03:13cycle of child marriage be broken well we've identified there are at least three prongs to this

03:20one of them is you do need laws that enforce the um the um fact that people shouldn't be married

03:26girls shouldn't be married before they're aged 18 and that includes informal unions and it means that

03:31those laws need to be enforced and then the second one is keeping girls in school the longer you can

03:35keep them in school the less inclined they are to marry and the more options they have available to

03:39them to have other options in their life but that means digital literacy as well so they can understand

03:44the risks of the new social media platforms that they're engaging in and the third one is really

03:49tackling the issue of um the view of how girls are perceived in communities and that means working

03:54with boys and parents and religious leaders to see that girls are valuable beyond being wives and mothers

04:00and that they have value beyond that in their communities

04:04you

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