A young girl, perhaps 14 years of age sits in her classroom, looking at her science textbook, and telling her friend how she hopes to become a doctor someday, perhaps the first doctor in her village. Suddenly, her father walks into the room and drags her out. The next thing she knows, she’s being married off to a man who’s perhaps as old as her father. In the blink of an eye, her dreams are shattered and she’s lead to a place she doesn’t want to be in. The Travel, a musical video by social worker Lipi Chervathur Jobson opens with this heart-breaking description of child-marriage in India, a social evil that still prevails today.
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Funded by the Christian Children’s Fund of Canada (CCFC), a child-focussed international development organisation, the film hopes to spread awareness about the issue. For more than 50 years, the CCFC has been helping children and families move from poverty to self-reliance. It supports children and communities in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Nicaragua and Paraguay. “There are girls with aspirations, who get married at a tender age to relations without even understanding what it would mean to them for the rest of their life. This is child marriage. In the video titled The Travel, the young girl is abused every day and night and made to do all the work,” says Lipi.
Lipi says that though there are laws that prohibit child marriage (Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929), (The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006) the practice of child marriage is still prevalent in many parts of India. It remains rooted for centuries and the cause is a web combination of traditional, cultural, social, religious and economic factors. “It severely affects the adolescent girl children and makes a long-lasting negative impact on their entire life,”says Lipi. The CCFC focusses on engaging with children as active participants in addressing this issue and also works with parents, opinion leaders/religious leaders, marriage performers and with the government stakeholders as torchbearers of children’s rights.
