When children have children: Sabah’s child brides face adult hardships

KENINGAU – It was not Stefyanie Sikut’s* choice to get married at 12. 

Her parents decided to marry her off to a boy just two years older from the same village after she fell pregnant.

She had her first child at 11 out of wedlock, another at 12 and her third when she was 14.

She is now 17, and her 19-year-old husband works as a farmer in their village where they raise their children, now aged 6, 5 and 3.

Life has never been easy for Stefyanie, a Murut girl in a small community in the remote Keningau village, some 98km from town.

Poverty and hardship have forced her to stop schooling to raise her children.

It is a similar story for Norita Daim, 18, whose parents married her off five years ago.

Norita said she was not prepared to get married as she had only just completed Primary 6 then.

Aside from travelling long distances to get to school, her farmer parents could no longer afford to continue paying for her education.

After her marriage at the age of 13, she stopped attending classes and started married life with Peter Jasim, who is two years older than her.

“By getting married, I was able to ease the burden of my parents. I have three younger siblings who need my parents’ care,” she said.

Norita herself has three children – she had her first child when she was 14, her second at 16 and the third a year later.

Stories such as these are not uncommon, although Sabah had in 2019 raised the minimum age of marriage to 18.

The Women, Family and Community Development Ministry last year announced that there were 543 child marriages in the country from January to September 2020.

The ministry’s statistics included 520 applications to the Shariah Judiciary Department, with the highest number of such cases in Sarawak with 83, followed by Kelantan (80) and Sabah (63).

While most states had agreed to raise the minimum age of marriage to 18, Sarawak, Pahang, Terengganu, Perlis, Negri Sembilan, Kedah and Kelantan disagreed.

As for non-Muslim couples, the ministry said the National Registration Department records showed 23 underage marriages in the same period, with the highest number of them in Sarawak with seven, followed by Selangor with six. – The Vibes, January 27, 2021

* Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals