Tutu promotes campaign to end child marriage
y Lisa Rein, Wednesday, October 10, 9:30 PM
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African anti-apartheid activist, Nobel Peace Prize winner and chair of the Elders, a group of independent global leaders working for human rights, was in Washington on Wednesday to promote his latest campaign: ending child marriage in the developing world. In 2011, the Elders created “Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage,” which now has 200 members in 38 countries.
Tutu, 81, met with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on the eve of the inaugural International Day of the Girl Child at the United Nations. Clinton announced new government and private initiatives to prevent child marriage and promote the education of girls, including mandatory reporting of the minimum legal age for marriage and the rate of child marriage in the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices ...
We are really pushing this campaign for ending child marriage by 2030. It’s prevalent all over what you might call the developing world. It’s in virtually every African country. I was actually surprised. I used to think it was something that happened only in Asia. My eyes were opened by the fact that the highest incidence is actually in Africa ...
... it is a very debilitating practice. The girl child is not physically, let alone emotionally, ready to bear a child. The statistics are that girls who give birth when they are under 15 are five times more likely to die giving birth than girls of 19 and over. And their children are 60 times more likely to die before their first birthday ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/tutu-promotes-campaign-to-end-child-marriage/2012/10/10/545a0146-130e-11e2-a16b-2c110031514a_story.html
