Karima Lotfy with her two-month old child in a family planning clinic in Sohag
“I don’t know” is a simple answer usually used with sophisticated
questions or questions that relate to worlds out of one’s interest, but
not to answer the question “How old are you?”
A three-day awareness raising
campaign,
coordinated by the Health Ministry and the United Nations Population
Fund (UNFPA) in Sohag governorate, saw encouraging attendance from women
from the governorate’s villages to obtain better knowledge on family
planning.
According to official figures, Sohag, approximately 470km south of
Cairo, has been highlighted as among the poorest three governorates in
the country, alongside Assiut and Qena.
Speaking to a married woman from Dar-El-Salam in Sohag during the
campaign’s field visits to local family planning clinics, she told Daily
News Egypt she does not know how old she is.
“I didn’t turn the decade,” Karima Lotfy said when pressed to answer
the simple question using an Upper Egypt local expression meaning she
did not turn twenty.
The doctor in the clinic, Noha Abdelrahim, said that Karima was
married before she turned 17, a “Sunni marriage”, another patient in the
clinic commented.
The “Sunni marriage” refers to a marriage usually illegal due to the
young age of the wife, but popularly accepted due to understanding that
it is religiously legitimate.
Islamic law (Shari’a) defines the age of marriage with the age of
puberty, which the majority of Muslim scholars generally set at 15.
Egyptian marriage laws though, are not much different as they set the
legal age of marriage for men at 18 and for women at 16. However,
Egypt’s constitution adopted in 2014 stated that “every person below 18
years of age is a child”. It adds that “the state provides child-care
and protection from all forms of violence, abuse, ill treatment and
sexual and commercial exploitation”.
Karima stood in the clinic holding her two-month-old child, telling
us she did not receive any education but she came to the clinic to try
to find out more about family planning.
The issue of child marriage is synonymous with poverty and a
patriarchal society. The UNFPA states: “Child marriage is a human rights
violation. Despite laws against it, the practice remains widespread, in
part because of persistent poverty and gender inequality. In developing
countries, one in every three girls is married before reaching age 18.
One in nine is married under age 15.”
Omayma Radi, 20, who has a seven-month-old son, received minimal
education, attending only the first year of elementary school. She
attended an awareness raising meeting in the poor village of Fezzara in
Sohag.
“My husband also didn’t receive education and I don’t want to have many children so I can raise them well,” she said.
Omayma got married when she was almost 18 and it scares her to have
many children. However, due to her early marriage, local community
pressure will push her to have more children, which will be too much for
her young age to take care of and give them the care they need.
“Child marriage threatens girls’ lives and health, and it limits
their future prospects. Girls pressed into child marriage often become
pregnant while still adolescents, increasing the risk of complications
in pregnancy or childbirth,” UNFPA states.
A suggestion submitted to the constitution drafting assembly in 2012,
raising the age for marriage for women to 21, was rejected by religious
scholars, as they considered it an assault on religious rules.
