What Photos can teach us about Child Brides in India | Saumya Khandelwal | TEDxChennai

let us all take a journey down memory lane shall we I want every person in the audience to recollect those childhood days when you were young about 10 12 years old naive and got through the days without the burden of any responsibility it was a joyful period wasn't it I still remember pushing the merry-go-round so fast that I fell right off and broke a tooth and I will while I was still trying to process what had happened a friend brought me the truth as a servant now in retrospect respect I wish I did keep it for memory but come to think about it having a perfect childhood is overrated not every moment in time is filled with happiness and laughter and perhaps our idea of a perfect childhood is not the reality of every child in India as for the statistics about 12 million children in India get married by the time they reach 10 years of age to put it in perspective that is the population of Jammu and Kashmir child marriage is rampant in both rural and urban India and it's a pressing issue for many states but today I'm here to talk to you about the plight of the girl child in travesty a concept of childhood fails as most of the girls and child in shrawasti get married by the time they reach the age of 12 and some of them have kids even before they are eligible to vote for the twelve-year-old saman it's sunken that she was getting married when the ceremonial turmeric was applied on her hands little did she know that marriage meant much more than applying Vermillion on her forehead she was inconsolable but she did not share her apprehensions with anyone she was the first among her friends to get married and her parents did not even tell her before fixing her marriage so who could she go to so little Suman told herself that this is the way of life and that there was no escaping it what someone did not know was that the law protects her against child marriage well sure child marriage is illegal in India but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's abolished or punished take the past crime records for example in the year 2016 there were four cases reported under the prohibition of child marriage act in utter Pradesh and the acquittal rate stood at a zero percent clearly formulating a law and practicing it are two very different stories when I met Sabha three for the first time she was a happy kid she was 14 years old and she was the best in her class and she was also the only kid in the village who wanted to talk to me about herself but she didn't know that women could have careers when we sat down to brainstorm though she started imagining what she wanted to do right from being a teacher to an Anganwadi worker and then she finally settled for being a police inspector she was married then but she hadn't started living with her husband during another wizard a couple of months later I found savithri in her house where she was now visiting from her husband's house she was wearing a sari her plucked eyebrows constantly strained and she hardly smiled sabha three's husband was working in Saudi Arabia and while she was taking care of his parents and family back home in his village she wasn't being allowed to work unlike what she'd been led to believe and she wasn't reading any of the books she had taken with her either all day long she was restricted to taking care of the house I started documenting these precious girls in 2015 and ever since I've encountered dozens of them and all their stories remain the same a girl child is born and she is gifted with the responsibility of taking care of the household if she is fortunate she gets to put on the uniform and she starts to believe that she'll be independent in the family and life in general but her dreams come to a bitter end as she approaches puberty because with puberty come in marriage proposals these girls may be from different ages and from different backgrounds but their stories and this situation in the family broadly remains the same I document these stories because I think they need to be told because we can't pretend like all is well in the world and no the problem doesn't get solved by just educating the families about the ills of child marriage because it's much bigger than that it lies in patriarchy poverty poor health facilities lack of government subsidies and policies for those who need it desperately and if we were to depend on education for solving this problem it would take a generation before we see any sort of considerable impact and we don't have the time for that but with this knowledge also comes the realization that there's only so much that I can do it needs a lot more people and a lot more effort to eradicate the social disease and to give these girls an opportunity to dream and I urge governments civil societies and individuals like you and me to invest our energies into the future of these girls thank you [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 138,578

Rating: 4.9289851 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Humanities, Feminism, Human Rights, Photography, Social Change, Society, Women

Id: -TAWBayABsM

Length: 6min 7sec (367 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 28 2018