Random News Stuffs

Forced Marriages Of Minors

Oh look. Another reason to want to just give the poor people the right to go purging.

Site: The Daily Beast

TW:
Pedophilia
R+pe
Forced Marriage
Child Marriage
Abuse

A 14-year-old girl was jailed last week after running away to for which she had been purchased.

The girl, who has been identified in the local press only as Anayeli "N," was supposed to marry a neighbor in Guerrero state whose family had offered a sum of 200,000 pesos (about $9,300 USD) hand in marriage.

Anayeli's mother had accepted the payment, and the neighboring family had hired a band, slaughtered a cow, and prepared a marriage feast . All told, the would-be groom's parents spent around 56,000 pesos (2,600 USD) on wedding prep.

But Anayeli, who is a member of the indigenous Mixtec people, wasn't having any of it. Early on the morning of the "big day" she escaped from her family's house in the village of Joya Real, in southwestern Mexico, and took shelter in the nearby home of her 15-year-old friend Alfredo "N."

"She thought it was her older sister who was going to be married, she never thought it would be her, because she was a minor," said Abel Barrera, director of the Guerrero-based Tlachinollan Human Rights Center, in an interview with The Daily Beast.

When Anayeli found out that it was not her sister but herself who was the intended bride, "she preferred to flee without notifying anyone, regardless of the fact that her mother had already agreed [on the price] and the expenses paid by the groom's father," Barrera said.

"None of that interested the girl. She simply wanted to preserve her freedom, her life, and her safety," he said. Barrera said that, although technically illegal under Mexican law since 2019, between families living in rural regions.

Once a girl is bought, she is "treated as an object" by the family that paid for them, Barrera said. "She has to work, she has to cook the food, she has to do the cleaning, she has to go to the fields, and if she gets to work as an agricultural laborer, the money is not going to be paid to her, but to her father-in-law," Barrera said.

Marina Reyna Aguilar, the executive director of the Guerrero Association Against Violence Toward Women, told The Daily Beast that it took great courage for Anayeli to brook social norms by running away and refusing to be "part of a tradition that forces underage girls in their community to marry by agreement of their relatives in exchange for money [or] goods or things such as beer, cows, or other animals."

With the child bride gone missing, the groom's family, asked Joya Real's Community Police officers to track Anayeli down. They swept the small village, found Anayeli and Alfredo in hiding, and marched them off to jail.

"In the [indigenous] community there is no one who watches over the rights of girls," said Barrera, who is also an anthropologist specializing in local native culture. "It is the men who do justice, the older men, as there is a patriarchal culture. Women cannot go to the defense of girls because they would also be imprisoned."

During the night they spent in jail, the two minors were told by police officers that Anayeli must submit to the marriage or pay back the $2,600 the groom's family had already spent on the wedding and related fiestas.

The are an independent, auxiliary form of law enforcement meant to provide security in isolated regions of Mexico where there is little or no federal or state police presence. As such, officers in small towns and villages sometimes act unilaterally, since they answer to no higher authority, said Aguilar. She accused the Community Police of abusing their power by "normalizing the customs that contravene the human rights of girls and women," despite the laws on the books forbidding underage marriage.