Pale, a 50 year-old woman, is sitting on a chair in the market in Fushë Kosovë selling clothes together with her husband. When asked if she believes that child marriages are present in the Roma, Egyptian and Ashkali communities, she said, smiling: “I am a good example.”
She got married vey young and now has five daughters and three sons. All are married.
“I was married very young. I have five daughters and three sons. All are married. Now we have 35 grandchildren. We have to stay outside when they come to visit,” says Pale.
Pale’s husband, Avdi, adds that they don’t know all of their names.
“We get married early, for that reason we are a large family. I don’t know the names of all my grandchildren I just say ‘hey you’ and they turn around. It’s hard work to remember all the names. My daughters-in-law are pregnant and the family will become even larger, I can’t afford to learn all their names,” he says.
Mehmet, a 9-year-old from Fushë Kosovë, says that both of his sisters got married very young and didn’t continue their schooling.
“My oldest sister got married in Germany when she was 17 and now she has two young sons. My other sister got married when she was 18 and has a son,” says Muhamet, adding that he knows a lot of cases like these.
Jeton Jashari, representative of the Roma community in Fushë Kosovë and assistant of the minister’s deputy in the Ministry for Community and Return, says that girls from the Roma community usually only go to elementary school. When they reach puberty, they stop going to school because of the possibility of sexual harassment or because their parents fear that something bad might happen to them.
“The Roma community is Muslim. That is one reason why girls get married very young, but the number is decreasing. It is not so alarming, like people think that everyone in the Roma community gets married when they are 12 or 13 years old,” he says.
According to him, since people from the Roma community are Muslim, they live according to the holy book, where it is stated that it is better to get married young in order to escape amoralities and infectious diseases.
According to a report from The Network of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian Women Organizations of Kosovo (RROGRAEK), 96.8% of this community are Muslims.
There is a law in Kosovo that prohibits child marriages. Jashari believes that different organizations and institutions should deal with this problem and follow police and judicial proceedings.
“I got married when I was 26 years old, and my wife was 24. Two years ago we had a son. With this, I have tried to be a good example, although it’s a personal decision. A positive point is that they have become aware that they need to legally register their marriage, some of them even follow all the divorce procedures,”he said.
According to UNFPA, “Child or early marriage is the union of two persons, officially or unofficially, at least one of whom is under 18 years of age.”
The fact that they are children shows us that they are incapable of making a decision as big as getting married. Child marriages violate children’s rights.
The number of child marriages is now relatively low in Kosovo, but not something extraordinary for some ethnic groups like Roma, Ashkali, Egyptian and Gorans.
In the UNFPA report it is stated that child marriages are rarely registered. Their parents or legal guardians avoid contact with authorities because of the penal punishment and because administrative procedures for a legal marriage under the age of 18 take time and cost money.
Refering to UNFPA, in 14 municipal courts, 116 requests for early marriage were reported in 2010 and 107 in 2011. No marriages involving minors aged 15 and under were recorded in 2010.The 108 officially registered child marriages in 2010 involved 16- and 17-year-old girls.
Some of the consequences of child marriages are family violence, isolation from friends and family, divorces, unwanted pregnancies, complications during pregnancy, interruption of education and low chances to get employed.
According to research conducted by RROGRAEK, from this community, 38.3% of girls are uneducated, while 77% are married.
Nearly all of them are housewives – 61.7%. Only 1.2% are employed.
A large number of them, 34%, have agreed that their parents decided where and with whom their daughters marry. Only 13% didn’t agree.
When it comes to education, 47% agreed that parents should decide if their daughters should get an education, and only 6 % disagreed.
According to the data of Kosovo Agency of Statistics in 2016, 16,051 Kosovar couples got married in Kosovo, and 1,359 Kosovar couples got married abroad.
Among them, 180 marriages came from the Roma, Egyptian and Ashkali communities, followed by 176 Bosnians marriages and 130 Serbians marriages.
Fjolla Hajrizaj
