‘Compulsory education should be raised to Form Five’

KUALA LUMPUR: To stop child marriage, legislation change must be backed by other measures including raising the mandatory age for education, a forum on child marriage here heard.

Currently, only the six years of primary education is compulsory but it should be made mandatory until Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) level, said panellists at the “Child Marriage: Happily Never After” forum by the Bar Council Child Rights Committee and the European Union Delegation to Malaysia. .

Social activist Syed Azmi Alhabshi, who runs a transit home for young girls, said many under- educated girls viewed marriage through rose-tinted glasses as they did not have any other choices to break free from the poverty trap.

“Most people say that children are safer in school and if the system is not in place, it is not possible to keep them safe. With education, they can have more opportunity to increase their potential and make better choices.

“Everyone talks about banning child marriage but I disagree if we don’t have a support system in place,” he said at the forum held at Publika on Saturday.

He remembered meeting a teenage girl who wanted to marry her school-dropout boyfriend as she thought he was a successful crab catcher as he earned RM300 a month.

The real way to stop child marriage, said Syed Azmi, was for the children themselves making an informed decision by saying that they did not want to get married because they had other options.

Child rights lawyer Srividhya Ganapathy said banning child marriage or capping the minimum marriage age at 18 would mean criminalising teenagers who married to break free from the poverty trap, particularly in rural areas.

“Instead, there is a need to ensure that all children get equal access to education and sexual reproductive health education as many child marriages happened due to unwanted pregnancies,” she said.

She added that children in rural areas such as in Sarawak, who did not have easy access to secondary schools, were often married off for economic reasons as their parents could see no other viable options..

Recounting her recent trip to a Penan village, a nine-hour drive away from Kuching, Srividhya said the nearest secondary school was 200km away.

“The parents we talked to said they had married their girls off just to put salt on their table.

“I would want equal access to education for all children so that we could solve a whole set of problems in the country and not just child marriage,” she added.

Rohingya community worker Hafsar Tamesuddin, too, acknowledged the importance of education, saying that there was a need to open up access to public schools to refugee children in Malaysia to reduce child marriage among this group.

Outreach programmes among the communities to ensure that change happened at the root level were also vital to increase awareness, she said.

“Activists and NGOs play a very important role in reaching the girls, the women and the men, even the ustaz, to educate them on the dangers of child marriage,” she said.

All three panellists agreed that the minimum age for marriage should be 18 with an absolute minimum of 16 with parental consent.

The government is currently working towards raising the minimum marriageable age to 18 across the board.