Paper Example on Organizations, Laws, and Norms Concerned With Child Marriage

Introduction

Child marriage is a universal crisis thus various international intergovernmental organizations and non-governmental organizations are taking the stance to control the menace. These international bodies are setting regulations and norms to mitigate the effects associated with child marriage. A comprehensive discussion of these organizations is below:

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Save the Children Organization

The organization has been in existence since the year 1919 based United States and other 120 global countries. The organization prioritizes the needs of children because they believe in transforming the lives of children and their future. The organization focuses on providing health awareness programs, disaster management, response to emergencies, education, support global health, and provides a healthy foundation for children.

Role

Regarding the role of Save the Children Organization the organization runs child protection programs like abuse, violence, exploitation, and neglect. Therefore, the organization deals with child marriage through the protection programs against abuse and exploitation. Child marriage is an activity that disturbs the future of children with support from the customary norms and authorities spearhead the activity in marginalized communities.

Activities to address child marriage

The organization addresses the issue of child marriage by finding a home for the neglected children; reuniting children with their families as well as taking care of those without homes. Besides, the organization runs public campaign child trafficking that leads to the rise in cases of child marriage. Further, the organizations encourage the children to participate in leadership programs that help children to educate one another the way to protect themselves.

Since 1980, Save the Children has fought to improve the lives of children in the state of Nicaraguan and improve the lifestyle of low-income families. Besides, the organization has programs to improve health facilities and making health care available for all the people. Notably, in the global aspect, the organization launches protection programs, thus helping more than 3 million children suffering from abuse, neglect, and exploitation.

Care Global

This is a global humanitarian organization supporting impoverished women. Care Global was founded in 1945 extending their services to more than 94 countries globally. The organization takes the mandate of providing education for girls to address the problem of child marriage. The organization offers the general purpose of improving health, educating communities, educating communities, and fighting hunger.

Role

The organization collaborates with local organizations, communities, and families to create awareness of the impact of child marriage through running educational programs.

Activities to address child marriage

The organization extends education support to countries to tackle early marriages. The organization puts education for the girl child at the forefront, as lack of knowledge among girls is the leading cause of more pregnancies among adolescent children.

The major impact of Care Global is working to fight poverty around the world and supporting impoverished women. More specifically, in Malawi, Care global empowers the education of girl child that as positively reduced cases of pregnancies' among the teenagers from 45% to 4%.

The UN Women Organization

UN women is a global body that founded in July 2010 and started exercising its mandate on January 2011. The organization purposefully accelerates the empowerment of women and fight gender equality worldwide. Besides, the UN Women offers humanitarian aid and emergence to disasters amongst the member countries.

Role

The core aim of the organization is to track the progress of women towards meeting the needs of women in the UN member States. The organizations set global standards, policies, programs, and services with the verge to support feminine gender. Therefore, the UN Women organization directly fights child marriage through empowering women.

Activities to address child marriage

The Organization fights for equal participation of women to achieve their sustainable development goal. Moreover, UN Women focuses on delivering in these aspects:

1. Fighting to end violence against women
2. Involving women is peace and security processes and affairs
3. Fighting for women`s equality in leadership and other participation programs
4. Empowering women and fighting to put women in national development, budgeting, and planning.

Some of the milestones of UN Women include its advancement of establishing initiatives that address violence against feminine gender. As such, the initiatives like The Together Girl Initiative works with other organizations like UNICEF and UNFPA to address the issue of violence against children in the limelight.

United Nation Population Fund (UNPF)

UNFPA is an agency was established in 1969. The organization aims to create awareness for healthcare services by supporting access to maternal healthcare and family planning ("About us," n.d.).

Role

The purpose of the agency is to protect maternal women together with the infant to ensure child mortality to zero. The organizations promote high standards of healthcare, especially during childbirth.

Activities to address child marriage

UNFPA offers the following support to address child marriage:

The organization strives to prevent gender-based violence that affects 1 out of 3 women.

The organization runs a campaign to fight female genital mutilation that leads to early marriages among children.

The key achievements include supporting maternal women across the globe who face life-threatening complications and training thousands of health practitioners to boost the standards of services.

Hymenium: Help the Children Global

Founded in 2008 in Geneva, the organization is a non-governmental organization that provides international child sponsorship throughout the world.

Role

The organization is dedicated to preventing violation of children`s rights. The organization educates and support many children to empower them to understand their rights regarding child marriage and customary marriages ("Child marriage: 'an affront to human dignity and well-being and an impediment to sustainable development?" n.d.).

Activities to address child marriage

The association strives to improve the dignity of the living conditions and protect their fundamental rights. The key achievement of the organization is to support projects to enhance children protection ("Who we are - Humanium ? We make children's rights happen," n.d.). Besides, they provide legal assistance to underprivileged victims in the society as well as raising awareness of children`s rights reaching out a target of more than five million people yearly.

Human Rights Watch

The nongovernmental organization fights for human rights around the globe ("Human Rights Watch," n.d.). Founded in 1978, takes the initiative to update people on the situation regarding the respect of human rights for over 90 countries.

Roles

The organization collaborates with various governments, regional groups, United Nation, and financial institutions to streamline the practices that aim to promote justice and human rights around the globe.

Activities to address child marriage

Human Rights Watch is the defender of human rights in various parts of the work. The organization has the Intel that offers facts abuse from the sources, investigate the facts, and expose the findings ultimately putting pressure those in power to respect human rights and allow justice to prevail. This vibrant humanitarian movement fights to advance the cause of human dignity for all the people.

Laws, Norms, and Treaties

The Registration of Marriage

This is set aside under the standards of marriage as convention agreed upon by the United Nations. This convention was signed by 16 countries with 55 parties to the convention. The treaty was signed and ratified by the General Assembly Resolution 1763 (XVII). This convention agreed upon the consensus to establish the minimum age for marriage as enshrined by the law to propagate registration of marriages.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The document was originally published in 1948. The document was written to set a common standard of safeguarding human rights for all the people from different part of the world. The documents set the basis of the fundamentals of human rights that are acceptable and protected in the whole universe.

The general purpose of the universal declaration of human rights sets the fundamental human rights that are accepted and respected in the whole world.

According to ("Universal Declaration of human rights," 2016), the provision of this law for child marriage is in the article 5, 16, 18, and 26. Article 5 highlights that no one is supposed to be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman treatment. Article 16 (2) denotes that marriage shall be entered with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. Article 18 points out that everyone has a right to freedom of thought, religion, and conscience. Article 26 depicts that every individual has a right to education.

All these human rights directly address child marriage. A right to education is mandatory; children are entitled to education until they reach secondary level. Denying children education increases the cases of child marriage. As such, the document recognizes the impact of assuming the right to education.

Child Marriage and the Law

There are existing laws that set the minimum age for marriage that safeguards children from engaging in early marriage. The law recognizes children and accords them full protection of the law.

Age Consent

The availability of legislation to set the minimum age of marriage protects the children from customary or parental consents that force girls into marriage.

Therefore, the law helps discourages those families are communities that encourage children to marry to desist from that insult. Thus, the regulations offer provision for protecting child marriage among patriarchal societies.

References

About us. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.unfpa.org/about-us

Child marriage: 'an affront to human dignity and well-being and an impediment to sustainable development? (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2016/9/speech-by-lakshmi-puri-on-child-marriage

Darraj, S. M. (2010). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York: Chelsea House Publishers.

Human Rights Watch. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/

Karns, M. P., & Mingst, K. A. (2004). The United States and Multilateral Institutions: Patterns of Changing Instrumentality and Influence.

Universal Declaration of human rights. (2016). Universal Declaration of human rights (Multilingual Edition), 17-30. doi:10.18356/7dbb3fb7-en

Who we are - Humanium ? We make children's rights happen. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.humanium.org/en/presentation/