| dc.description.abstract | The study sought to examine the social and economic effects of
early girl-children marriages on the welfare of the girl-children
in Bentiu Town, Unity State. The study was guided by the
following objectives; to assess the factors contributing to early
girl-children marriages in Bentiu Town, examine social and
economic challenges brought on by early girl-children marriages
on the victim’s married family in Bentiu Town and suggest ways to
overcome the magnitude of early girl-children marriages among the
communities living in Bentiu Town, Unity State. The study adopted
a case study research design with a sample size of 80
respondents. The data was collected from young women (victims of
early girl-children marriages), parents of the victims, civil
society groups, teachers, community health workers, traditional
birth attendants, traditional authorities and public officials
from the State Ministry of Social Welfare and Gender (SMOSWG)
using self-administered questionnaires and an interview guide.
The findings on the nature of early girl-children marriages in
Bentiu Town revealed that early girl-children marriages are
frequent incidences with 85 teenage girls on average married each
year in Bentiu and this causes dreadful developments in the
community. The existing statistics show that most weddings
conducted in Bentiu Town were weddings between teenage girls and
elderly men. This has been evidenced by weddings observed by the
researcher of this study in Bilnyaang, Kuerboni and Biemruok
villages between May, 2011 and July, 2011.
The findings also revealed that young girls themselves were so
uninformed that they did not know that early girl-children
marriages had fatal social effects such as committing suicides
due to failure in life, prostitution due to high rate of poverty
among the early married women, sexual transmitted diseases as a
result of young women selling their bodies to make a living, high
rate of unwanted pregnancies and abortions, high rate of deaths
caused by fistulas, obstructed deliveries, prolonged labour and
stillbirths, gender-based violence caused by age-gap between the
early married women and their elderly husbands and high rate of
burglaries as a result of too many street children produced by
early married women and could not be cared for and economic
effects such as unemployment among the early married women since
most of them did not finish their basic education to be able to
get jobs, temptation to steal to make a living, highway robberies
and road killings to make a living, imprisonments as a result of
crimes and starvation, homelessness and fighting over land
ownership due to lack of basic needs such as food, shelter and
ii
medication. They were uninformed because they were not allowed to
go to schools because their parents hypothetically perceived that
sending girls to schools would make them prostitutes and that
would eventually make them (parents) lose the bride prices they
would get from their girls. | en_US |
