Author: Deepak Joshi Pokhrel
With the dawn of modern civilization, social media became an integral part of every society, be it the global south or the global north. Social media has penetrated the majority of rural and urban areas in South Asia. With social media, life has become much easier as it helps people who are poles apart stay connected. But it has come with a string attached. It has significantly adversely impacted the children, triggering child marriages in South Asian countries.
Child marriage is one of the grave challenges in many South Asian countries. It is a violation of human and child rights. Child marriage is a tragic reality for girls and boys in South Asia, but it continues to disproportionately affect girls. Despite this, the social anomalies continue to thrive in many South Asian countries including India, draining our efforts and resources to the drain.
When a child is married, their whole world becomes narrow. They are often cut off from their families, stop going to school, and for girls, it could lead to lifelong serious health problems. To say, they are isolated from friends and excluded from participating in their communities, taking a heavy toll on their mental health and well-being. Likewise, the girls who marry in childhood are likely to experience domestic violence and get pregnant before they reach 18. Three in four child brides in South Asia give birth while they are adolescents, and the consequences can be devastating for both the mother and their babies. In Bangladesh, India, and Nepal, child brides are four times likely to be out of school than their unmarried peers, while in Pakistan, one in four girls who marry as a child has never been to school.
According to UNICEF’s latest report, one in four women in South Asia is married before their 18th birthday. The report also says that South Asia is a home to nearly 45% of the world’s child brides- 290 million of them. This is a very alarming statistic, and it is likely to increase if timely and concerted action is not taken against this social evil. No doubt, in the last decade, significant progress has been made to reduce child marriage in South Asia. Yet, if we continue at the same pace, it could take 55 years to eliminate it.
Social structure, poverty, illiteracy, etc, are the traditional causes of child marriage in South Asian countries. Likewise, economic hardship and ignorance are the other reasons that girls are married off before they reach fifteen years. However, in this digital era, easy access to the internet on mobile phones is viewed as the key reason behind the growing cases of child marriage in South Asian countries.
In this digital era, social media part of every society, be it in the West or the East. Social media fastest means of communication, helping people come close, sharing their happiness and sorrows. However, the use of social media upon the interests of the people. Many people use it for their academic purposes, while many, mainly youth, use it as a medium to access entertainment, including porn movies on their mobiles. With the internet and mobile, the world has become a small village as people can communicate within the blink of an eye with those who are poles apart.
But the same social media is misused by adolescent youth. They use it as a tool to access porn movies, which only plagues their mental health. Not only this, but through social media, they start conversations with known and unknown people. Soon after, they befriended and shared their heart. In due course of time, they elope without thinking much about their future.
Many attribute the tragedy to easy access to social media on their mobile phones, enabling them to talk to known and unknown people, share their hearts, and eventually elope. They hold the view that lack of awareness regarding education and the idea of independence, combined with the impact of social media, has encouraged teenage girls to consider child marriage.
The findings from research related to the use of social media for adolescents in the UK state that 90% of the 12 thousand respondents were using the internet regularly, and 70% of them had at least one profile on social media ( Rianto and Sukmawati, 2021). Until the second quarter, the number of internet users in Indonesia reached 73.7% of the total population of 1976.7 million users. The survey results also show that teenagers are significant users of the internet. More than 70% of active internet users are people aged 13-18 years and are urbanites. These teenagers often referred to themselves as digital natives, such as social media for various purposes including reading the latest news, entertainmen,t or building relationships with family and close friends ( Supratman, 2018)
Social media penetration varies widely across South Asian countries, ranging from as low as 8.6% in Afghanistan to as high as 69.9% in the Maldives.
Interestingly, when looking at social media penetration among internet users, the differences are less stark. For instance, while Bangladesh has only 30.4% overall social media penetration, 68.4% of its internet users are on social media. Bhutan stands out with a high social media penetration of 57.9% despite being one of the smallest countries in the region.
This social evil not only brings shame to society but also it is plays a spoilsport in the well-being of a child, mainly a female. It is thus a complex issue and calls for a multi-prong approach to address it. Access to information is the fundamental right of every citizen across the globe. Any attempt to forbid adolescent from accessing information is not only impossible but also counterproductive as it deprives them of their fundamental rights, including access to information. Instead, the focus should be laid on awareness programs such as providing the merits and demerits of social media and sexuality education so that they understand the risk of marrying at an early age. Likewise, they can also make the best choices regarding their reproductive health.
As things stand now, this is the only viable option to aware youth about what is the adverse effects of child marriage.
