Eva Luise Köhler honors Stephanie Sinclair for
her picture taken in Afghanistan
The
American photographer Stephanie Sinclair is the winner
of the international photo competition “UNICEF
Photo of the Year”. Her photo shows a wedding
couple in Afghanistan who could not be more opposite.
The groom, Mohammed, looks much older than his 40 years.
The bride, Ghulam, is still a child; she just turned
11. “The UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007 raises
awareness about a worldwide problem. Millions of girls
are married while they are still under age. Most of
theses child brides are forever denied a self-determined
life”, says UNICEF Patroness Eva Luise Köhler
at the award ceremony in Berlin. According to UNICEF,
there are about 60 million young women worldwide who
were married before they came of age, half of them in
South Asia.
He’s forty, she’s
eleven. And they are a couple – the Afghan
man Mohammed F.* and the child Ghulam H.*. “We
needed the money”, Ghulam’s parents
said. Faiz claims he is going to send her to school.
But the women of Damarda village in Afghanistan’s
Ghor province know better: “Our men don’t
want educated women.” They predict that
Ghulam will be married within a few weeks after
her engagement in 2006, so as to bear children
for Faiz.
During her stay in Afghanistan,
it consistently struck American photographer Stephanie
Sinclair how many young girls are married to much
older men. She decided to raise awareness about
this topic with her pictures. Particularly as
the official minimum age for brides in Afghanistan
is sixteen and it is therefore illegal to marry
children.
Early marriages are not only
a problem in Afghanistan: worldwide there are
about 51 million girls aged between 15 and 19
years who are forced into marriage. The youngest
brides live in the Indian state of Rajasthan,
where 15% of all wives are not even 10 years old
when they are married. Child marriages are a reaction
to extreme poverty and mainly take place in Asian
and African regions where poor families see their
daughters as a burden and as second-class citizens.
Already in their younger years, girls are given
into the “care” of a husband, a tradition
that often leads to exploitation. Many girls become
victims of domestic violence. In an Egyptian survey,
about one-third of the interviewed child brides
stated that they were beaten by their husbands.
The young brides are under pressure to prove their
fertility as soon as possible. But the risk for
girls between the ages of 10 and 14 not to survive
pregnancy is five times higher than for adult
women. Every year, about 150,000 pregnant teenagers
die due to complications – in particular
due to a lack of medical care, let alone sex education.
For her project, Stephanie
Sinclair also traveled to Nepal and Ethiopia.
She wants to do research on the topic of child
marriage in other regions as well and then publish
a book on the issue.
Photo:
Stephanie
Sinclair, USA, Freeleance Photographer
According to UNICEF estimates, about
3.3 million children in Bangladesh are involved in child
labor – almost 20% of the working population,
despite efforts during the 1990s to ban child labor
in the textile industry. Many children are forced to
carry out hazardous work with dangerous chemicals in
paint shops, workshops and tanneries. A child worker
receives 60 Taka per day (less than 1 Dollar), about
one-third of the regular wage for adults. Factory owners
prefer to employ children, thereby keeping trade unions
out of their factories. By entering the labor market
at such an early age, children have no chance of getting
an education and consequently no chance of getting better-paid
jobs.
The photographer G.M.B. Akash
grew up in Bangladesh and has been working as a professional
photographer since 2002. He first and foremost watches
people on the margins of his country’s society.
With his camera, he tries to document their right to
exist, hoping that his pictures give them dignity and
raise awareness for their difficult situation.
Photo:
G M B (Golam Mostofa Bhuiya) Akash, Bangladesh, Freelance
Photographer, Panos Pictures
Smokey Mountain – Children of a charcoal burners’
camp in Manila
On her ninth birthday, Annalyn S.*
was photographed by German photographer Hartmut Schwarzbach,
happily jumping on a red sofa that she had found on
the garbage dump near the city of Manila (Philippines).
It has been three years now that Annalyn and her family
have lived beside Manila’s enormous garbage dump
called “Aroma Smokey Mountain”. That’s
where her family lives in a charcoal burners’
camp.
Like most other children in this
camp, Annalyn has to search for wood among the garbage
every day, bring it to an oven and monitor the charcoal
production amidst acrid smoke and unbearable heat. Together
with her siblings and parents, she has to bring thousands
of liters of water to extinguish the fire and collect
the finished charcoal. The family has to hand over most
of their yield to the local mafia.
Like almost all children here,
Annalyn is malnourished and thus much too skinny and
small for her age. She looks like a five-year-old. Many
of the children can neither read nor write and do not
attend any school. One day, Annalyn wants to be a teacher.
