Issue No. 828

Stolen Childhoods: Somalia's Enduring Crisis of Child Marriage

When the news broke in March about an 8-year-old girl who disappeared in Bosasso and was later found to be married to a man in Puntland, many Somalis reacted with fury. For six months, this child was trapped in a nightmare after being taken from her home, hidden and ultimately only discovered after a viral video of her reciting the Quran exposed her whereabouts. Around the same time, a 17-year-old Somali girl in Kenya was allegedly killed for refusing a forced marriage. While extreme, these are not isolated incidents. UNICEF has reported that 36% of Somali girls are married before the age of 18, with 16% married by 15. Yet, despite the recent outrage, it is improbable that this anger will translate into lasting change.

Reasons for child and forced marriages are myriad in Somalia's highly patriarchal society, but ceeb – the fear of shame and dishonour– has long played a central role. This translates across a number of issues but includes a family's fear of their daughter losing their virginity and birthing children out of wedlock. Enforcing marriage at a young age can help 'protect purity,' as well as the family's honour. Such notions of preserving purity and modesty are further found in the traditional justifications for the practice of Female Genital Mutilation/ Cutting (FGM/C), which the overwhelming majority of Somali women have undergone. And this commodification of women's bodies continues into marriage, with Somali girls and women also traditionally valued according to their ability to have children. 

But there are many other 'practical' reasons for rural and nomadic Somali communities to marry off girls, including being bartered for godob reeb (grazing rights) or diyya – to settle blood debts between clans. Much of this falls under the ancient customary system known as xeer, which governs many interactions between and within Somali clans. An alternative jurisprudence model, xeer is based on a system where elders negotiate settlements based on precedent, oral agreements, and parts of Sharia law. It is an oral practice that dates back centuries and is ostensibly established on the principles of reciprocal accountability, reconciliation, and collective responsibility among clans. 

Xeer further plays a role in excluding women and girls from a host of decision-making processes in Somalia. For instance, following bouts of inter-clan conflict, girls are routinely intermarried with opposing clans as a means to resolve the violence. Other practices that fall under xeer, such as higsian-- the forced marriage of a sister of a deceased wife to the widowed man-- are also prevalent. Concepts of love, dating or freedom of choice to pick romantic partners play little role here. But the lines between 'forced marriage' and 'arranged marriage' are blurry, with forced marriage rarely reported in large parts of Somalia. And being barred from the councils that examine any such marriage disputes when between clans, women must depend on their male relatives for advocacy. In turn, justice, including in cases of sexual assault or violence, is routinely sacrificed for narrow male-dominated clan interests, with women frequently forced to marry their rapists-- often to either preserve peace or 'purity.' Refusing marriage can lead to exile from a community or further violence.

More broadly, poverty remains one of the key indicators of child and forced marriages, not just in Somalia but across global cultures and contexts. With nearly 70% of the country living below the international poverty line, girls are married off at a young age at higher rates during periods of financial stress. This has been particularly accentuated during the devastating drought between 2020 and 2022, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, with drought-stricken families reportedly trading their daughters for camels. With millions having been displaced in Somalia from the climate crisis, which has driven a growing peri-urban underclass, child marriages have further remained common in the country's major cities.

Despite growing opposition in some quarters, legal protections for young girls against forced marriage are also threadbare, with still no legally defined minimum age for marriage in the whole of Somalia. Legislation regarding child marriage remains muddled across the country's various administrations, while enforcement is another matter altogether. Puntland's 2016 Sexual Offences Act set the marriage age at 18, and Jubaland's 2020 child rights policy has similarly addressed the practice. However, the prospects of a nationwide federal ban remain distant despite pressure from various women's rights groups, such as the Puntland Women Lawyers Association (PULWA). The struggles of passing federal legislation concerning women's and children's rights have been all too evident in recent years. Most infamous was the tabling of the highly regressive Sexual Intercourse Bill in 2020, which legalised child marriage at puberty, contained no age of consent, and removed the crime of sexual exploitation. Only under concerted domestic and international pressure was the bill shelved, but the political pressure heaped upon the legislation's proponents, including from a number of government-aligned sheikhs, was significant. 

Across Somalia, social progress has been repeatedly stalled by the more conservative strain of Islam that has penetrated society, including amongst the younger generation. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, the Salafist influences in Somalia have rapidly grown amidst state collapse, driving a sentiment that the gender rights movement is antithetical to more conservative family values. For instance, the wealthy transnational Salafist movement Al-I'tisaam b'il Kitaab wa Sunna, which shares a jihadist forefather with Al-Shabaab, controls the largest number of Islamic primary schools in the Horn of Africa today. Rather than the elderly holding onto more conservative elements of Somali society, it is increasingly a younger cohort that aggressively polices cultural and religious boundaries. For some, resisting the objections against child marriages is about thwarting a perceived pernicious and immoral Western influence in Somali culture.

But even with child marriage criminalised in parts of Somalia, stemming such cases remains highly complicated. The pervasive weakness of the Somali state means that the traditional clan structures often supersede any legal intervention. Courts routinely dismiss cases under pressure from elders, allowing influential families to bypass flimsy legislation by framing the marriage as 'religious.' This, too, typically reflects the uneven power balance that exists during xeer-based negotiations between the higher and lower-caste clans. Structural issues, such as a lack of birth registrations in rural parts of Somalia, further complicate the matter. Not to mention that Al-Shabaab also routinely abducts girls to marry fighters as part of their 'tax' on communities.

Still, the recent protests in Puntland and elsewhere signal a shift amongst some of Somalia's urban youth, challenging the ceeb culture. Activists like Ilwad Elman have mobilised thousands against regressive laws, declaring, "You cannot celebrate youth while stealing their childhood." And women's rights groups continue to lobby for the stalled 2018 Sexual Offences Bill, which would criminalise child marriage and align laws with international standards. However, the incumbent federal government has repeatedly shown itself not only uninterested in women's and girls' rights but actively opposed. Last year, for instance, Villa Somalia appointed a male former general to the Ministry of Women and Human Rights docket for several months while also renaming it to the 'Ministry of Family and Human Rights.' Today, the protests and noise surrounding the paedophilia case in Puntland may have already faded, with Al-Shabaab and the farcical 'national dialogue' process seizing the headlines. But these issues of child and forced marriages are certain to endure, and many more childhoods are likely to be lost as a consequence.

The Somali Wire Team