Mervete Hashani, now 24 years old, was forced by her family to get married when she was still a minor. She says that she didn’t want to get married that early because she had goals for the future which her parents took away her by making that decision for her.
“At 17 I hanging out with a guy. When my father found out he forced me to marry him, because according to him it wasn’t morally right to go out with a guy with whom I wasn’t married,” says Hashani.
She wanted to finish her studies and become anaccomplished teacher, but due to the low economic income of her husband’s family she couldn’t do it. Her parents didn’t help her either, to them she now was a stranger.
According to a research study of Kosovo Agency of Statistics on marriages in Kosovo, 134 women aged 16-19 were married during 2015.
Since a year earlier 95 legal child marriages were registered, whereas in 2013 a total of 105, it is apparent that this trend is not only continuing, it is actually growing. All these cases involved girls aged 16 to 17 in marriageswith older men. And all of these are, of course only the registered cases; the number of unregistered cases is hard to determine.
Mervete’s mother Z.H. considers that it is better for children to get married than to roam streets. According to her, the most important thing in a girl’s life is to create a happy family.
“My daughter was young, she couldn’t tell good from bad. We made a decision for her and look where she’s now: mother of a boy and a good spouse,” she says.
According to the Criminal Code of Kosovo, an individual who forces a child (under 18 years of age) to get married, can be sentenced from 2 to 10 years. When the parent or legal guardian violates this code and forces a child aged 14-16, the prison sentence may vary from 5-10 years and at least 15 years of prison for forcing children under 14 years old to marry. If the young couple isn’t officially married, according to the law it’s another violation that falls in the category of “co-habiting without marriage”. The same sentences also apply to parents or legal guardians who force their children to “co-habit without marriage”.
A 2012 UNFPA (United Nations Fund for Population Activities) research study about child marriages in Kosovo, concludes that 1,451 girls aged 16-19 were married in 2010, compared to only 161 boys of the same age.
“Immediate registration is particularly rare in child marriages. First, the criminal penalties mentioned above for parents, guardians, or adult spouses engaged in forced marriages make it highly unlikely that they would alert the authorities to such marriages. Second, the administrative procedures for legal child marriages, including court and forensic fees, can be both time-consuming and costly. Instead, spouse(s) often wait until they reach age 18 to register their marriage,” the report says.
Other reasons leading to child marriages in Kosovo include love, pressure from the family, woman safety, socio-economic conditions, unplanned pregnancy, peer pressure and tradition.
This phenomenon is not typical for Kosovo only. Based on statistics, every year, 15 million girls worldwide get married before they reach the age of 18, and approximately 720 million women that are alive were married before they turned 18. If this trend were to continue, the estimation is that it can reach up to 1.2 billion by the year 2050.
Xhenete Hasani
