It was very much of a Papa dont preach, keep your rosaries off my ovaries moment- an excellent day to be a denizen of Sindh – especially if you are a girl child. The consequences of child marriage are terrible for mind and body alike.
Sharmila Farooqi and Rubina Qaimkhani are our heroes for having placed their lives on the line by leading on this bill. Interestingly enough, we have friends named Sharmila and Rubina- both Hindu Bengalis.
However as we see elsewhere in SAsia and on other humanitarian projects (for e.g. administering polio drops), passing laws is a necessary first step but only tight enforcement and co-opting of community leaders will make this a properly functional barrier against the sea of misogyny.
……
The Sindh Assembly on Monday passed the Sindh Child Marriages
Restraint Bill, 2014 prohibiting marriage of children below 18 years.
The assembly is the first provincial legislature in the country to approve a bill to curb child marriages.
Under
the bill, the minimum for marriage is 18 years. Those found violating
the law would be punished in line with the penalty suggested in the
legislation. According to the law, in cases of underage
marriages, those involved can be sentenced to three years in prison and
they can also be fined.
The bill was first presented in the assembly in 2013 by Sharmila Farooqi and Rubina Qaimkhani.
……
Link: http://www.dawn.com/news/1102840/sindh-assembly-passes-bill-prohibiting-child-marriages
…..
regards
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Brown Pundits Archive
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary.
Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.
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