Somalia, Guinea, Djibouti, Egypt and Sierra Leone have highest FGM rates
Girls in parts of the global south continue to be married young, with more than half of girls in the least developed countries wed before their 18th birthday. The prevalence of female genital mutilation (FGM) also remains high, with more than 90% of women in Somalia, Guinea, Djibouti, Egypt and Sierra Leone undergoing the procedure.
About 98% of Somali women aged 15-49 have experienced FGM, and 56% of women in south Asia were married before they turned 18, according to data released by the UN children’s agency, Unicef.
Speaking at the Girl Summit, Unicef’s executive director, Anthony Lake, said some countries had shown an improvement in recent years. “On FGM, the model should be Kenya, which has made huge progress,” he said. “On child marriage, if you look at Indonesia, you’ll see through legislation and in other ways, they have made great progress. In each case, it’s been largely because of a concentration on community action and encouraging communities to take responsibility.”
South Asia and west and central Africa had the highest rates of child marriage, while FGM was concentrated in east and west Africa, the data shows.
The data is based on information from the Demographic and Health Surveys, Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, and other nationally representative surveys from 2005-13, Unicef said.
Social attitudes that view child marriage as a way of protecting young women are encouraging forced unions, Lake said. “They’re not protecting a girl when they condemn her to a life that isolates her, in many ways, from her society. That’s not protection, that’s almost a lifelong [jail] sentence. We have to work at the community level to help the communities themselves take the lead in breaking down the traditions that put so much social pressure on parents to allow these things to happen to hundreds of millions of girls.”
Girls who had been forced to marry at a young age were more likely to be trafficked, Lake said. “I have met girls who fled from marriages that they did not want to be forced into, which are often to much older men, and when they flee to shelters or on to the streets and go from rural areas to urban areas to flee a marriage at a very young age, they are very much subject to the bastards who sell them into prostitution or other servitude.”
Lake said new forms of community engagement could help secure lasting change. “One of the things we haven’t paid enough attention to yet is the possible impact of using cellphones and SMS texting, which can help spread the word more quickly among affected communities,” he said.
Tuesday’s summit, which was attended by the UK home secretary, Theresa May, and the international development secretary, Justine Greening, aims to end FGM and child marriage within a generation.