Girls Not Brides

Dear Humanity,

The issue of child brides has been bothering me for a long time now. 

I am a 17 year old girl from Ontario, Canada. I am just a teenager, not old enough to drink, vote, enlist in the military, or to get married! However, if circumstances were different and I was born in a place like; India, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Kenya, or the Congo, there is a 1 in 3 probability that I would have been married off at the age of 8 or 9, even as young as 5 years old. My husband would most likely be 20 to 30 years older than me and probably extremely abusive. I would no longer be allowed to go to school and any chance I would of had at a job and a descent future would be washed away. As soon I started to get my period I would have been forced to bare children, possibly dying in the process and with an even greater chance that my baby would be dead within the first year! If I survived long enough to see my 17th birthday I would most likely have 5 or 6 children under my care, stricken with poverty and no way out.

That is the life for over 64 million women, between 20-24 years of age, who were married or in union before the age of 18! Help stop the injustice! If you are just as disturbed by what has been happening, and will continue to happen so long as we stand idly by, than please join in my quest to spread awareness of this horrible tragedy. Too many times we go on with our lives not realizing how lucky we truly are to live in a part of the world where we are free to live our lives the way we choose!

Please help spread the word, in the hope that one day this will no longer be an issue and that many more girls will be able to live their lives in the same fortunate circumstances that I am luckily enough to find myself in. 

For information on this situation and for ways to help go to the website, http://girlsnotbrides.org/, an organisation dedicated to the irradification of child brides!

Thank you,

The voice of the silenced!