As many as 50 underage New Zealand girls a year are being forced into marriages by Sikh and Muslim religious leaders who abuse a loophole in the Marriage Act to get away with it.
A respected ethnic women's group, Shakti Community Council, is making the claim this week as it launches a media campaign to get the act changed.
"Within Sikh temples and mosques, girls as young as 13 and 14 are being married off and without being registered," Shila Nair of Shakti told the Sunday Star-Times.
The marriages, performed by imams and granthi who know the law and the ethnic loophole, are consummated. "The girls are getting pregnant as young as 14 and 15," Nair says. "Even the school systems do not pick it up and the girls go through a lot of suffering.
"It is a large problem – these girls do not come out, only when the abuse gets bad, do they seek help."
Leaders of the Muslim community in New Zealand, however, say they are unaware of any underage marriages being performed here.
Dr Mohammed Musa, of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, said he had checked with the head of the religious community and he was adamant that no religious leader in the Muslim community would be reckless enough to perform a marriage ceremony in which the bride was underage.
"He's been in contact with all the religious leaders around the country, who are also marriage celebrants, and he's never been aware of any such marriages being conducted in New Zealand. The laws of this land do not permit this kind of affair," Musa said.
Under the Marriage Act ethnic religious leaders do not need to be registered as marriage celebrants.
Two years ago, Shakti launched a lobbying campaign with politicians to get this changed and the organisation said it believed the government would make the reforms. It also feared that, in an election year, the government may back off for fear of offending politically active Sikhs and Muslims in Auckland and Hamilton.
On Thursday, Shakti will brief the media and provide an extensive report on the problem.
It will also call on the government to create a special policing unit similar to Britain's Home Office Forced Marriage Unit.
Nair said she had no doubt that imams and granthi knew that they were performing marriages unacceptable to the wider New Zealand community.
"They cannot claim ignorance," she said, adding that Shakti was attracting hostility from Sikh and Muslim leaders.
"The community doesn't want to accept it, they say it is a one-off thing. We know, working with women, that it's not one-off."
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Nair said Shakti is culturally sensitive, but is strong on defining what is appropriate for women.
"[Ethnic communities] have to know they are not living in their country where their laws probably permit this," she said. "They are living in New Zealand and this is clearly a violation of the fundamental rights of the girl, child and women, and it's not acceptable."
Underage girls were being married off in a religious context. "These girls are deprived of their rights to study, to work, and they are girls growing up in New Zealand."
The girls are mostly locally born but their parents are from abroard and occasionally the male involved is brought in under an arranged marriage which Immigration New Zealand permits.
"[Underage arranged marriages] should not be permissible within New Zealand," Nair says. "And we, as a women's organisation, we have been lobbying against these kind of things that infringe on the rights of girl children and young women."
Anjum Rahman, of the Islamic Women's Council, said she was unaware of such marriages being performed in New Zealand. "If people are doing this, they must be doing it very quietly or within a closed community because we are certainly not aware of it.
"There is no knowledge that this is happening in any kind of way. If it is happening, it is happening underground and away from our knowledge," Rahman said. "It is certainly in no way sanctioned or approved of by our organisation."
- Sunday Star Times
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4651...into-marriages
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