It seems that a nine year old Sydney girl is now out of reach of Australian jurisdiction and it is feared that she has been sent to another country where she will become the wife of a complete stranger in a marriage arranged by her parents. This certainly contravenes Australian law but it is a case of our law coming into conflict with customs that have existed for centuries in other parts of the world.
When an immigrant is granted Australian citizenship they take an oath that they will live by the law of this country, but when our law sharply diverges from the customs that prevailed and were instilled during their formative years elsewhere - their allegiance to those customs remain uppermost. They also face peer pressure to conform to custom if their circle of friends is composed of people from that same culture.
If we hope to stop immature young girls being married off in arranged marriages and that awful practice of female genital mutilation to remove the joy of sex as a means of keeping them faithful - we have the task of changing the culture that considers this "normal practice "!
The director of our Immigration Women's Health Service who has face to face contact with the migrant community knows what a massive task that will be and comments that "printing glossy pamphlets "is not the answer. The people involved are not going to look up Australian law on the Internet or consult community literature to guide their actions. The purpose of the present information campaign is to alert the community to what is happening and encourage those who suspect a forced marriage is in the works to pass the word to those with the ability to intervene - and perhaps prevent it happening.
Unfortunately, trying to solve this problem is putting a divisive wedge between young migrant girls and their parents. In many cultures parents believe that they "own "their children and that they have a right to completely dictate what happens with them. Often, brides are promised the moment they are born in exchange for commercial treaties between families - and girls have little other value in the order that exists in male dominated society.
It must be most confusing for girls living in a household with such values and experiencing the culture that surrounds them at school when they are mixing with children from other cultures. Perhaps that delivers the best chance to break the vicious circle of child brides. A child which suspects that a planned overseas "holiday "will end in a forced marriage can circumnavigate that end by speaking up to a teacher or other trusted adult. It takes courage to do that and in many cases it will permanently end the child/parent family relationship.
That may be the answer to the child bride problem, but usually genital mutilation occurs at an age when a young girl is still an infant - and unable to speak out to prevent it happening. It is also a process often carried out by an untrained family member with a crude instrument, and once done it is an irreversible medical event that imposes a lifelong void of sexual feeling on the victim. Often, the instigator is the young girl's own mother.
That will be the hardest problem to solve. It will probably involve relentless legal pursuit of offenders - and serious prison sentencing to get the message through that genital mutilation will not be tolerated in this country, and if that offends the beliefs held by newcomers to our shores - then so be it ! Unfortunately, the victim suffers an entire lifetime of loss that the female population of Australia would find hard to envisage.
Fortunately, history has had a happy ending to the many battles between child and parent that erupted amongst the wave of migrants fleeing to Australia at the end of the second world war. Often it was the children who were the only family members able to converse in English - and now those children are becoming grandparents. The passage of time smoothed the rough edges of inherited custom. The migrants of yesterday are unidentifiable in today's generation - and in time that will happen again to our recent arrivals !
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