Feature: Let's wake to somber sufferings of children

BEIJING, Nov. 6 (Xinhua) -- If the official UNICEF 2009 report on child protection is not authoritative enough, then a candid thumbnail sketch of children subject to the most extreme forms of exploitation and violence known to mankind should add enough authenticity to ring the bell, alarm bell that is, to wake adults up to the somber sufferings of their innocent juniors.

A GIRL ALREADY IN A FAMILY WAY?

Suni was reluctant to look back at her life. She was married at the age of 13 and widowed at 18 after having given birth to three children.

Lalita Saini dares not to look ahead at her life. The 14-year-old has been married for three years and now is soon expecting her own child.

Child marriages and early teen pregnancies still haunt India even though the country in 1927 initiated a ban on marriage for girls under 12 and raised the legal age for females to marry from 15 to 18 in 1978.

According to the UNICEF report, 47 percent of India's women aged 20-24 were married before the legal age of 18.

Another independent study, conducted by Anita Raj, an associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health, had similar results.

Raj's report found that 22.6 percent of women in India were married before the age of 16 and 2.6 percent were married before 13, with 48.4 percent of women married as children having given birth before 18.

An Indian government survey found that almost 30 per cent of boys were married before they reach the legal marriage age of 21.

Even a 100,000-rupee (almost a year's per-capita income) fine established by the Indian government in 2006 did not succeed in reversing the trend.

Each year around the Akshaya Tritiya (or Akha Teej) festival, girls in their early teens are still married off in some states of India.

"I didn't want to get married back then, but I had no choice," Suni said. That is Suni's regret but she deems herself lucky in that she has survived teen pregnancy and early child bearing whereas quite a few others have not.

Child marriage is also a social issue in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Central African Republic, Guinea, Mali, Chad and Niger.

The UNICEF report points to the fact that one third of the women aged 20-24 in developing countries are married off before 18 and the number of girls involved in child marriage is as many as 64 million.

A BOY PREFERS A RIFLE TO A CANDY BAR?

The shock of witnessing his father shot and killed and decapitated by militants was so much that 6-year-old Al-Khalil Muhee could not stop playing his own imagined war game with a make-believe rifle outside his home in Iraq, always murmuring "I will kill you all. I will decapitate you all."

Though eight years older, Nada Joma'a found it nothing if not hard to understand the scene in Gaza Strip either.

An Israeli missile killed her mother, destroyed their house, and wounded Nada and her siblings.