nsnbc : Malaysia attempts to regulate rather than the issue of child marriage in the recently passed Child Act 2001. Nancy Shukri, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, said minors who want to get married will be required to obtain written consent from the Menteri Besar or Chief Minister in their respective states. Child marriage is particularly prevalent among Malaysia’s Muslim communities regardless of ethnicity.
Nancy Shukri, avoided the “hot potato”, or the fact that child marriages are particularly prevalent in Muslim communities, saying that “most child marriages occurred because the couple had indulges in pre-marital sex.
Families, she claimed, would then usually permit “the girl” to marry her partner. Nancy h stressed that parents should educate their “daughters” not to think about getting married while being under the minimum legal age. Ironically, Shukri made her statement during a seminar on “women’s rights”.
The Minister stated that there were 105 applications for child marriage in Kedah last year, compared to only 76 in 2014 and 38 in 2013. “Between January and Feb 29 this year, 13 applications for child marriage have been recorded, and this is very serious issue and should be curbed,” she added.
Shukri also noted that there had been 552 cases of domestic abuse Kedah last year compared to 404 in 2014 and 284 in 2013. In addition, there were also 14 physical abuse cases involving children in the state last year, 11 in 2014 and 13 in 2013.
What Shukri failed to mention was that most marriages involving under aged youth involve under aged girls and adult males. Many of the marriages have been pre-arranged by families, others involve the statutory rape of undr aged girls, resulting in a marriage as “arrangement between families”.
In November 2015 Murray Hunter noted that incest, rape and pedophilia are rampant in Malay heartlands. Hunter stressed that: over recent years Malay kampong life has witnessed a massive rise in drug use, crime, domestic violence, incest, and rape. The rural heartland of Malaysia has a dark-side, with an increase in incidence of domestic and social problems. Decades of state neglect and politicization of infrastructure at the very grassroots of society has been accompanied with a decay of social morals and ethics.
Malaysia is along with Egypt and Turkey one of the countries where child-marriages still remain “legal”. CAPMAS noted in October 2015 that a total of 88,000 Urfi ( unofficial, but some argue Islamically sound) marriages were converted into registered marriages in 2014; 62,000 of whom were of girls who were below 18 when they got married, according to the annual report of the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS.) Researchers at Gaziantep University, Turkey, concluded in 2013, that one in every three marriages in Turkey is a child marriage.
CH/L – nsnbc 13.04.2016
Source Article from http://nsnbc.me/2016/04/13/malaysia-tries-to-regulate-child-marriage/
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