Take A Pyramid Approach To End Child Marriages In India: Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee

India is home to the largest number of child brides in the world with girls as young as 8-year-old are married off to men much older than them. According to the National Family Health Survey-5 (2019-21), the overall rate of child marriages has dropped from 26.8 per cent (2015-16) to 23.3 per cent. However, it is still high despite laws, programmes and schemes in place to address the issue. To eradicate this social evil, Kailash Satyarthi Children's Foundation and NDTV have initiated Justice For Every Child – Child Marriage Free India. The aim of the campaign is to reduce child marriages by 10 per cent from the current level of 23.3 per cent by end of the campaign in 2025.

Over 20,000 women joined the campaign launched on October 17. Speaking at the launch event, Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee shared the steps required to end child marriage in India. Ms Gbowee who has been a torchbearer of peace said, “When I think about ending child marriage, the first thing that comes to my mind is a pyramid. The fight against child marriage must take a pyramid approach – the bottom, the middle and the top. The bottom being those 20,000 women who have signed up to end child marriage but that is just not enough. At the middle level, we need all of the community leaders, religious leaders, media, and all those. At the top level, it is the political will - politicians, those in parliaments and at the Supreme Court level. It is the political will for prosecution because laws in themselves will not end child marriage.”

Ms Gbowee has led a women's non-violent peace moment and actually helped to bring to an end an awful civil war. When asked about the role of women in putting an end to the evil practise of child marriage in India, she said, “Going together, not putting themselves together into small cooperatives to say we are the anti-child marriage police in our community. Because one thing you have to acknowledge is that before any child marriage happens in any community, the women are aware. I want to use this knowledge to end child marriage; coming together as a group to say, we will not allow this practice to happen in our community is very key.”