In the face of 'culture'

 Despite protestations that women are no longer, if ever it were so, discriminated against simply by being women, or that sex/gender discrimination impacts at least equally, if not more, upon men, the OECD reports in its latest Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) that despite 'some improvement', women continue to 'face barriers' preventing their full contribution to social and economic life.

At the New York launch of SIGI 2012, Michelle Bachelet, Director of UN Women, emphasised the importance of women's equal participation as 'fundamental to democracy and justice', this lying at the heart of monitoring the factors included in SIGI.

Paid employment, female labour force participation, secondary school enrolment for girls, and child and maternal mortality rates figure strongly in SIGI, statistics showing that countries with 'higher levels of discrimination against women perform more poorly on [these] development indicators'. Sex/gender based social and economic discrimination militate against women and girls' freedom and ability to participate equally in the polity. As Carlos Alvarez, Deputy Director of the OECD Development Centre, concludes: 'Legal reforms, economic incentives and community mobilisation are critical to rectifying this social discrimination and economic injustice.' A major obstacle is, he says, child marriage. SIGI shows over half the girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen in countries such as Niger and Mali are married. Earlier, UNICEF reported that in Niger, Chad and Bangladesh more than a third of women aged twenty to twenty-four were married from at least the age of fifteen.

African and Middle Eastern nations harbour the 'highest levels of discrimination' of all countries ranked in SIGI. In these regions, child marriage predominates. Yet child marriage is not isolated there. In other parts of the world, attention is increasingly focused on the harmful practice of forced and arranged marriage, with laws being instituted to end it.

The gross denial of rights to girl children in marriage and its consequences are so patent they ought require no recitation. Yet child marriage continues with girls being 'promised' at an early age, not infrequently at birth, being traded, 'given' as recompense for some crime alleged to have been committed by the child's relatives upon the family into which she is sold, or used to consolidate advantageous relations between families, villages or cultural groups.

Ultimately, as with forced and arranged marriages outside Africa and the Middle East - or occurring there because the girls and young women are taken back for that purpose by their families who have migrated elsewhere – the phenomenon is about control. Women who are allowed or able to grow to adulthood without being obliged to comply with patriarchal power exercised through a father and then through a husband are far better able to exercise rights, to enjoy independence of thought and action, and to affirm the autonomy that should accrue to a fully-fledged human being. Such women are perceived, too often, as dangerous. Outside the paterfamilias circle of power, who knows what a woman might do?

Enormous risks to life, health and physical and emotional wellbeing, poor education with consequent lack of paid employment opportunities and denial of economic independence flow from child marriage. In India, despite the legal marriage age for females being eighteen years and for males twenty-one, child marriage continues. This is particularly so, but not only, in villages and amongst tribal groups. Meanwhile in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an emphasis upon women as a commodity to resolve family and intra- or inter-village and tribal disputes places girl children in a perpetual condition of vulnerability to marriage at ages well below puberty.

In India, mass child marriages take place on Akshaya Tritiya and other days set down in the traditional calendar for such 'celebrations'. UNICEF reports in its 2012 'State of the World's Children' compilation that in some parts of India, over thirty-seven per cent of girls are married before they reach eighteen years, and many long before that birthday. These children are subjected to the violence of rape and other sexual abuses, then to miscarriages and (where they are unable to procure a termination or are prevented from doing so) childbirth followed by the responsibilities of motherhood when they ought to be being mothered themselves. Being children, the girls are at higher risk than adult of women of pregnancy complications and bodily damage, including genital-tract tearing (fistulas). Girls often seek steralisation to avoid the risk and pain of multiple pregnancies, which are common.

General health problems abound, including malnutrition and severe anaemia, both exacerbated by pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. According to WHO, a girl giving birth at fifteen years is five times more likely to die in childbirth than is a young woman of nineteen or above. Infants born to fifteen-year-olds are sixty per cent more likely to die.

Girls traded into marriage are denied their rights to education. Domestic labour and childrearing take precedence over literacy, numeracy and general primary and secondary education, with higher education being remote. In some countries (such as Southern Sudan), 'bride price' dictates denial of education to girls: an educated girl is perceived as less 'valuable' than one who has spent her childhood attending to home chores. Tradition has it that a woman wielding a pen is not only less valuable than one wielding a brush and broom, but that the ability to write has a negative impact. Hence, girls are removed from school in order to maintain their family's capacity to negotiate a higher 'sales docket' – whether it be a greater number of cows, pigs, goats or other farm animals, bushels of produce such as barley or other grain, or cash-in-hand.

In India, the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 (India) came into effect in 2007, setting penalties at two years' hard labour, a fine or both for those found guilty of marrying under-age girls. Every state was obliged to appoint officers to carryout its provisions, including community education, taking steps to prevent child marriages, and notifying police of breaches of the Act.

In Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom, governments have been alert - or at least alerted - to the spread of under-age marriage, leading to efforts to prohibit the practice whether at home or through the taking of youngsters abroad to avoid domestic marriage laws. Legislation is designed, too, to address marriages where consent is lacking, albeit the parties are of marriage age.

Since March 2011, Germany has imposed a five-year maximum prison term on those convicted of forcing another into marriage. In May 2012, the Australian Parliament began considering the criminalisation of forced marriage, with a maximum penalty of seven years. Earlier, in 2007, the UK addressed the issue through immigration law, to raise from eighteen to twenty-one years the age at which a marriage visa could issue for a foreign national outside the European Union. In Quila & Anor v. Secretary of State and Ors the Court of Appeal struck down the UK legislation on the basis that, 'not withstanding its proper objective', the 'arbitrary and disruptive impact of the rule on the lives of a large number of innocent young people' meant that the rule could not be justified, at least where one of the spouses was a UK citizen.

Nevertheless, the Court recognised that forced marriage 'is not merely a cultural or social problem': 'A woman forced into marriage is in [UK] law … a victim of false imprisonment and rape, and those arranging and procuring it are likely to be guilty of kidnapping and conspiracy.'

This meant the Home Office 'is justified in doing everything it properly can to prevent or inhibit it'. However, the method of immigration control chosen was not an 'appropriate means' of doing so. This follows, too, in that as SIGI and UNICEF indicate, forced and arranged marriages are not isolated to legal marriage, but figure in relationships where girls are obliged to live as 'married' partners with men despite being under-age.

To conclude that these forced marriages take place only outside Australia, Germany, the UK and other countries of 'the north' is to avoid the depth and breadth of the trafficking of persons prevalent around the world. Children and young people are trafficked for forced labour (including domestic labour), and for sexual exploitation – which can include being forced to live in a 'marital' relationship which has religious imprimatur despite the girl being just that – a child and not of an age to marry legally. The Australian approach recognises this.

Although a world away from underage marriage, the controversy recently exercising Facebook commentators and mainstream media, of the narrow range of clothing available for girls between seven and fourteen years of age, has resonance. Control creeps in through commerce.

Ana Amini of Port Macquarie and Gretta Hawkhead of Patterson Lakes complained on Target's Facebook page of the 'sluttish' style of clothing on the 'low cost' retailer's '7-14' racks:

'Dear Target, Could you possibly make a range of clothing for girls 7-14 years that doesn't make them look like tramps … You have lost me as a customer when buying apparel for my daughter …' [Daughter eight years]

'… much of Target's 7-year-plus range [is] made up of short shorts and dresses, low-cut necklines, sheer lace, or "grungy" clothing …' [Daughter seven years]

'It's very provocative and not appropriate for young girls at all. They're still children and you want to keep that innocence for as long as you can. But Target seems to think that once they turn seven, they're young adults.' [Daughter seven years]

On the Monday following a weekend of Facebook fury, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Mrs Amini's post 'had attracted more than 44,000 "likes" and 2300 comments – most … from parents criticizing the retailer for selling "hooker-style" clothes to young girls.' An Age and Sydney Morning Herald poll posing the question 'How do you generally rate the style of young girls' fashions sold in major stores?' recorded 18,830 votes, of which sixty-four per cent answered 'too sexy', twenty-five per cent said 'cute but occasionally too grown-up', six per cent plumped for 'mostly acceptable', with five per cent recording 'always acceptable and value for money'.

One mainstream journalist said Target was 'not to blame'. Rather, the commercialisation of childhood and contemporary social and cultural mores were. An online commentator held otherwise, contending that those articulating concern were projecting their own sexualised contentions upon girls, with girls being consigned to a 'prudes' category from which they should be freed. The 'moral majority' was hard at work, with Puritanism and mediaeval (sic) horrors of naked female flesh on the rise … This view appeared to be that 'sluts' rule, to be celebrated at whatever age, and that adult concerns for their children's wellbeing was misdirected.

Yet is it 'fair enough' that seven to fourteen-year-olds are presented with images of adult-as-prostitute as 'trendy' and 'desirable', with their own contemporaries or almost-contemporaries arrayed in similar attire, so that girls' aspirations are limited to an identification with (at best) 'celebrities' adopting 'grunge' or 'sexy' modes of dress, singers and pop stars living in a world where 'making it' or remaining at the top is dependent upon videos in which dress or the state of undress seems equally important as voice? Is it really 'okay' that what once was 'standard streetwalker' is sold as 'standard seven-year-old'?

Western culture no longer consigns girls into wifehood before their time. Now the message is that girls must conform to an adult sexualised image. In both cases, childhood vulnerability is ignored and the potential woman-as-independent, as her own woman, disappears. In under-age marriage, girls are forced into childbearing, childrearing, housework and husband-work, grown-up and grown old long before their time. Culture dictates control through submission of person. With Target-wear and its equivalents, girls are forced into seeing themselves as 'real' through adopting a sexually objectifying style of adult dress. Western culture sets girls on a trajectory toward early capitulation to the body-image imperative. How long before they conclude that Botox and breast implants are next on the 'must have' list?

Subjugation to marriage may seem and be aeons from subjection to the commercialised image. Yet whether controlled through marriage or commercialised images of what it is to be a girl-woman, East or West, North or South, culture thereby denies girls the right to be girls.