According to Unicef, approximately 12 million girls worldwide marry before attaining the age of 18 every year, with an estimate from Girls not Brides that 650 million women alive today were married off as children.
The Unicef report shows that boys are also subjected to child marriage, with one in five boys marrying before attaining the age of 18. Rural areas have a high prevalence of child marriage compared to urban areas and this differs in many regions in Kenya.
In many communities, the concept of early marriage has been contributed to by the presence of kangaroo courts that hinder the efforts of the legal systems to provide justice to victims of this harmful practice.
A case in point is the Kuria community, where this practice has been normalised, causing an increase in social issues. Some of the reasons the Kuria community has recorded a high prevalence of child marriage include female genital mutilation, cultural norms, lack of education on the justice system, ignorance of the public, poverty and male circumcision.
The consequences of child marriage include teenage pregnancies, school dropouts, poverty, maternal and infant mortality and domestic violence.
The kangaroo courts are an informal, unregulated and unjust judicial system that lacks clear guidelines on how to uphold human rights while dispensing justice since they do not encompass human understanding and empathy.
Usually, the kangaroo courts are used to solve marriage disputes but there has been a shift and they are now used to speed up the process of officiating a marriage between a child and an adult in cases where the girl is pregnant and the family is not ready to report to the authorities. The kangaroo courts are usually done discretely between the parents of the parties involved.
Kenya has made significant efforts to protect the rights of children by introducing the Children's Court and enforcing the Children's Act. But kangaroo courts persist.
A multi-faceted approach must be implemented by first addressing the root causes of child marriage in the Kuria community, educating and creating awareness on the laws that protect the rights of children, educating the community on the importance of the legal system and how it works to ensure the future of tomorrow is protected.
Youth advocate
