Jemimah Njuki works at Canada’s International Development Research Center. Her work focuses on the empowerment of women, especially those working in agriculture. She also runs a trust that supports girls’ education. BRIGHT Magazine spoke with Njuki about ending child marriage at the Aspen New Voices Evening of Storytelling in Nairobi, Kenya.
BRIGHT: Why do you do what you do?
Jemimah Njuki: What brings me to this work is my passion for women’s empowerment, and the fact that if we don’t empower women and girls, we won’t be able to attain the Sustainable Development Goals. They are half of the population. How can we not think about their issues, how can their issues not be central to the conversation on development?
BRIGHT: Tell me about your work with child marriage. What makes you passionate about that as a form of empowerment?
JN: I find the term “child marriage” an oxymoron, because you cannot have “child” and “marriage” in the same phrase. Those two don’t go together. If we take the definition of marriage to be the union of two consenting adults, then the fact that we’re talking about girls who are as young as 9 means we’re not talking about marriage at all. We’re talking about the sexual abuse of children.
This, I believe, has been hindering the fight against child marriage because it sanitizes it! It couches this practice within the respectable institution of marriage. When you have 60-year-old men having sex with 12-year-old girls, that is child defilement—and that is what we need to call it.
If we change the conversation to one of child sex abuse, then we focus on the man who is doing it, as well as the cultural beliefs that condone it.
BRIGHT: In so many countries, statutory rape — sex with a person under the age of 17 — is called rape. So why, in the international development context, does the term “child marriage” remain?
JN: There is a lot of cultural attachment to this term, although the fact that something has been done for generations doesn’t make it right. “Child marriage” sticks because of that cultural connection.
This is why I believe that men are going to play a very central role in ending it. A lot of this attachment is rooted in beliefs held by, and protected by, men. Right now, we talk about how more than 25,000 girls get married every day around the world. But what about the 25,000 men who marry those children? What about the 25,000 men who were party to arranging those so-called marriages?
It has to start with an internal shift of consciousness, and that is why the language needs to change. If people begin to see this as the sexual abuse of girls, it changes the way they think about the issue entirely. They stop seeing it as marriage; they stop seeing it as a cultural institution. And that change has to come internally, from within communities themselves.
BRIGHT: Child marriage is not only a cultural practice; often, it’s done out of economic necessity. How do we engender the idea that long-term investment in girls is worth more than, say, the short-term reward of a dowry?
JN: When a girl is married, say, at the age of 11 or 12, her opportunities for a meaningful life are reduced. She’s usually becoming the second or third wife of a much older man. It means she cannot continue with her education, meaning she has no income-earning power, and it also means she has no voice, no choice about whether or not to have sex.
When I say that this culture needs to change, it’s not just the culture around child marriage. It’s also the culture around exchanging goats for lives. This is where I’m saying language matters! So long as we’re calling it a “dowry,” very few people stop to think about what it means: it’s an exchange of goats for a life.
We pretend that it’s a way of cementing relationships between families, but there are so many other ways of cementing relationships between families that don’t involve a financial transaction.
This is where development organizations can come in. In one of the communities where I support girls, there was a project by Ford Foundation that connects women artisans with handicrafts markets. Possibilities of financially independent and productive women provide an impetus for communities to stop seeing their young girls as a tradable commodity, but rather as human beings who have potential to become more for themselves.
BRIGHT: Much of what you’re talking about—abolishing child marriage and recasting the role of girls in society—involve very deep cultural shifts. What is the right mix of outsiders, like the development organizations you just mentioned, with internal advocates?
JN: There’s a very strong role for people within communities to play, especially young people. All of these communities have young people who have gone to schools in cities, come back, and want to see changes in their communities.
Norms change because people’s attitudes change, then individual behavior changes, and as more people change their individual behavior, then you see change in the community’s behavior. But we first need those champions that say, “Look here, guys. You are my community. I love you. But this needs to change.”
And then, if development practitioners support champions like these, we will see things change. Norms will change.
What always surprises me is that it’s the norms that oppress women that we always think can’t change. Other norms are changing. Technology has changed so much about how communities organize, how they communicate. Why do we think it is so difficult to change those norms that oppress women? They will change. If we have the collective consciousness of the harm they cause women, norms will change. They have to. We have to believe.
