Disturbing campaign forces you to visualise child marriage

According to Unicef, 21% of young women globally were married before their 18th birthday, and 650 million girls and women alive today were married as children. These numbers are staggering, and progress must be made before more than 150 million additional girls will marry before their 18th birthday by 2030.

To shine a light on the practice of child marriage in Indonesia, M&C Saatchi developed a campaign for local NGO Indonesian Family Planning Association (PKBI). In Indonesia, one in nine married women in Indonesia were married as children, and the practice is often disguised as a deep-set religious belief, an adherence to cultural norms, or even an economic solution among poor families.

This has led to girls in Indonesia being married off well before they reach puberty, and this has shown to lead to maternal mortality arising from neonatal complications. In a significant move last year, Indonesia’s parliament revised the country’s marriage law by increasing the eligibility age from 16 to 19.

Anish Daryani, CEO of M&C Saatchi Indonesia, said that child marriage deprives girls of a normal childhood and the basic right to education. “It robs them off their innocence, and an opportunity to become contributors to the society at large. Society needs to nurture a culture, environment and practices which encourage kids to remain kids,” he said.

The campaign video itself is self-explanatory and we won’t delve too much into it. If anything, we hope this campaign has made you look into local marriage laws wherever you are and inform yourself of organisations or groups that fight against this heinous injustice. 

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