This is what Um-E Salma remembers about her wedding day.
“Before I started to dress up I closed my room and I cried a lot, and I told myself that this is all you are going to cry for the rest of your life.”
The groom was 26. Salma was 17.
She was transformed from an over-achieving tenth-grader into a bride terrified of what would happen on her wedding night.
“I was not educated about the subject even,” Salma said. “I was really scared of him coming in the room so I went to the washroom and I locked myself up.”
When Salma, 23, looks back at that night, she wonders how many other girls experienced the same thing.
One in five girls in Pakistan gets married by the age of 18. Many are poor. And many get pregnant quickly, drop out of school and pass their hopes and dreams on to their daughters.
Salma is an extraordinary success story, but most aren’t so lucky. Some are married off to settle debts, others to lessen economic pressure on the family. The US government has called child marriage a “human rights abuse” and made reducing early and forced marriages a key goal of its 2016 US Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent girls.
But there’s not a single USAID program targeted explicitly at ending child marriage in Pakistan.
They’re focused instead on increasing access to education, including a huge $70 million education initiative called “Let Girls Learn” that first lady Michelle Obama announced in Pakistan last year.
Child rights experts say access to education for girls is a key component of reducing child marriage, but it won’t work on its own. Changing societal norms and the social structures that allow families to marry their daughters off is important too.
“The reason is simple: the girls have no power,” said Anees Jilani, a lawyer and founding member of the Society for the Protection and Rights of Children in Pakistan.
Education can empower girls to speak their mind, but that won’t necessarily help them avoid marrying young.
“You may train them to air their views but once a male member of the family asks them to shut up, they will have little alternative but to comply,” says Jilani.
Jilani and other advocates in the US and Pakistan say addressing only education, instead of the underlying gender discrimination that makes child marriage possible in Pakistan, is less effective than a more comprehensive and wholistic approach that includes public outreach through media campaigns and sexual and reproductive rights education.
Other governments do fund child marriage prevention programs: The Dutch government funds the Pakistani non-governmental organization Rutgers WPF in its efforts to educate girls about the health risks of child marriage and train the girls on how to act as leaders in their communities, working against child marriage.
The IDRC, a Canadian development corporation overseen by Canada's parliament, is funding a similar program for the Pakistani non-profit Shirkat Gah. The US currently funds these kinds of programs elsewhere in the world, including in Bangladesh and Malawi. However, USAID officials say they do integrate efforts on child marriage into their other programs in Pakistan, such as education, community awareness, economic development and other efforts
Salma wanted to stay in school. She agreed to the arranged marriage only after her husband’s family promised she could stay in school. And she did, even after getting pregnant at 17.
She remembers being seven months pregnant, climbing four flights of stairs to her classroom.
“It was hard, and if I think back now I really wonder, how did I do it?” she wonders. “Maybe I didn’t know that it was hard. Nobody told me it's hard so I just did it.”
But Salma’s husband didn’t like her career ambitions. They split about a year ago.
Her 5-year old daughter, Umaima, now lives with Salma’s mother, Shafqat Munir, at the family’s home in a dusty small town called Jauharabad, about four hours from Lahore.
Shafqat Munir stands with her daughter, Um-E Salma, and her granddaughter, Umaima Awan outside her home in Pakistan. Grandmother and granddaughter live together while Salma pursues an engineering degree.
Andrea Crossan/PRI
Salma moved away for school years ago, and just got her engineering degree from a top-notch university in Islamabad. She visits her daughter when she can.
Juggling single parenting and career ambitions is not easy for Salma. Sometimes Umaima doesn’t even call her “mom,” but uses the Urdu word for “older sister”.
“Obviously I miss her a lot and she misses me as well, but I think eventually in a couple of years we’ll be staying together so probably we’ll make up for it” Salma says.
Salma just got an engineering job with an international oil and gas company. Soon she’ll be spending three weeks a month working on an oil rig in southeastern Pakistan.
“I had to do this,” Salma says, “because eventually where I want to be and where I want my daughter to be, this is I think the sacrifice time for both of us.”
Sacrifice. It’s a subject a girl married off at 17 knows all too well.
Umaima Awan swings outside her home in Pakistan.
Andrea Crossan/PRI
Munir recognizes the toll early marriage has taken on her daughter.
“If she hadn’t had the added responsibilities of marriage and children, maybe she would be able to excel more,” Munir says through an interpreter. “I feel guilty about this.”
The child marriage rate in Pakistan has dropped by half in the past two decades. Sindh, the country’s largest province, recently raised the legal age of marriage from 16 to 18. A similar law was proposed at the national level, but was thrown out after being deemed un-Islamic.
Advocates say the toughest part of reducing child marriage rates is changing attitudes about the practice.
But that’s the very thing Salma has managed to do in her family.
Salma was 17 when she was married. So was her mother. They want things to be different for 5-year-old Umaima.
When her daughter grows up, if she has a moment of doubt and asks herself what her mother would do, "that would be all my struggles rewarded," Salma says.
Carolyn Beeler reported this story from Jauharabad, Pakistan.