Belize Moves to End Child Marriages as Consultations Gain Momentum in the West

Consultations continued today in the west on the issue of child marriages.  The campaign to end child marriages was launched three weeks ago with an aim to amend the laws that currently allow persons under 18 to wed.  Today, the consultation team was in Belmopan, Santa Elena and Benque Viejo.  According to the head of the National Commission for Families and Children, Shakira Sutherland, they are focused on explaining why the legislative changes are needed and how it would benefit young persons and society.

Shakira Sutherland, NCFC Executive Director: “We are extremely happy that the children themselves understand what are the implications of the legal age being currently at 16 and so it is important for them to understand why is it important or why we are lobbying to change the age from 16 to 18. And so they did grasp the information, they themselves are sharing information from their surroundings, their peers, their family members and so they are very much supportive of the change of the legal age change. The age of consent and different legislations need to be changed. So what I had mentioned is that NCFC has a policy and legislative committee and in that committee we have stakeholders from the judicial aspect, we have attorney general, ministry of health, education and so it is important to note that we understand thoroughly that the legal age does not align. And so we know that we have been working on the amendments for different legislations such as domestic violence, marriage act the FACA, that’s the Families and Children Act. And so we will get to all those changes. However, we decided to start with the marriage age changing because this had stemmed from the Children’s Parliament last year, 2023, and this was the bill that the children had debated on. They wanted the legal age to be changed from 16 to 18. And so it’s just a work in progress and we are championing and we are ensuring that the children’s voices are heard.”

According to Sutherland, the data collected shows that child marriages are rampant in the Stann Creek District.

Shakira Sutherland, NCFC Executive Director:  “We have social impact, it affects us culturally, it affects us economically, it affects us in terms of education. So there are several different challenges that children who are married young will face and so we want to try to avoid these challenges so that it can make a better future for all of our Belizean children. The statistic shows that it’s extremely high in the StanN Creek district and and as well as in the urban. So people are thinking that it would be more of a rural issue, but the statistics are showing that it’s an urban issue. And our main district is in this Stann Creek district. So that is something that we all need to be aware of for the country in its entirety, and to know that in the Caribbean, we are like the country lining second with the most child marriage recorded and  early union recorded. So it is alarming for our country and so we are taking up this opportunity to make changes to our legislation. It is showing that the Maya ethnic group has been engaged the most in this. So we’re targeting everyone because it’s a community effort. So once we share this information and educate the general public, not only children, parents as well, it is important to allow them to know that this is something that we have to work on as a country.”

The consultation began in Belize City and has since been had in the north and the south.