The age of consent

One would have hoped that the 21st century would change the mindsets of the men who make our laws. This time the issue is child marriage and we stand – yet again – opposed to the global standards of the need for a reasonable age of consent for marriage. Last week, MNA Marvi Memon – member of the PML-N – presented an amendment to the Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929 to the National Assembly Standing Committee on Religious Affairs asking for the minimum age of marriage to be increased from 16 to 18 years of age. The bill hoped to increase the penalties for anyone who marries off any child before the very reasonable age of 18. The response by the Council of Islamic Ideology was simple – the proposed amendment was deemed un-Islamic. Not only that, according to the CII, a citizen of any gender can be married off at the age of puberty. The CII’s words of wisdom were joined by male legislators who agreed with the position that such a change would be against Islam. And at that point all debate ended and the proposal was rejected.

This incident may not be new or even surprising to most. It is just yet another example of the way the CII has used its authority to shoot down any move to bring Pakistan into conformity with the understandings of human rights. The Sindh Assembly already amended the Child Marriage Restraint Act to increase the minimum age for marriage to 18 last year. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly rejected passing such an amendment in 2013 saying it would be ‘controversial’. One in every four women in the world is still married off before the age of 17. And this problem in Pakistan is not just limited to rural areas as statistics indicate one in five marriages in urban areas involves a minor. If we take marriage as a contract between two people, how can we argue that a minor can legally and willfully enter into such a contract? More importantly, though, why was the bill presented before the Standing Committee on Religious Affairs in the first place? Is marriage an issue that is primarily religious? The shooting down of the debate in the NA standing committee shows in how many ways the CII and our religious Right have managed to encroach policymaking. The NA has lost an opportunity to set a precedent to protect minors. It is a sad state of affairs.