What do you think of this?

[ReallyTired]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-17336512

Is forced marriage really better than forced prostitution. Those poor girls look so young and hardly know what is happening to them. The young lads look shell shocked as well.

Surely the organisations are replacing one abuse with another.

Was it forced marriage though? I think that in lots of rural India womens life chances are still laid out for them when they are born - the cast system is starting to be dismantled, but for these girls to be unable to be married, uneducated - pretty grim really.
I would have thought that improving their educations to allow them to have other ways of earning money would have been prefereable to improving marriage prospects..

I am not sure whether the women/ girls were forced or cohersed. They look so young and frankly I doult that they could make an informed decision about marriage. Maybe I am projecting western values on them. Maybe the women are older than they look.

Certainly the girls need an eduation. That goes without saying

This link is more sinster.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-18128385

That is grim. I think that in both these cases better education and job opportunities are what is needed. We are still so much second place as women.
I think in the Indian example you are right, these girls are too young to make an informed decision, but all the ones being married were 18 or more, the young girls were becoming engaged. I guess the ngo was hoping to change attitudes, show that these girls could be 'respectably' married. They haven't had a good education and at this point they won't get it. Marriage is better to prostitution surely.
The real crime is though - that in both communities the choices are marriage or ruin - women are judged and live based on mens decisions - they aren't able to be their own person, it just isn't an available option to them. They can't support themselves without having sex with a man - so either they find a husband or they sell their body. Either way they are at the whim of a man. Heartbreaking.

i think it's a case of any port in a storm.
forced marrage being a better option than prostitution really depends on who you end up getting hitched to, could be worse than prostitution, i would probobly take my chances with a marrage rather than the brothel though.

india is changing so very quickly, maybe this is optomistic but i like to think that these practises will all have died out in a couple of generations, indian grandmothers will tell disbeliving grandchildren that they all got married on mass to stop them becoming prostitutes.

i was reading a post today where a women recalled getting her morgage in the 50's and it requiering a mans signiture! unbeliveable by todays standards.
the only point to that is to illustrate how much things can change.

This is heartbreaking and shows how necessary feminism is.

Also I don't think it's correct to say these practices will die out soon. They don't die out, unless we fight for them to die out.

And when we do fight, there will always be a section of men who want to hang on to their privilege and will fight justice every inch of the way with their arguments about tradition, common sense, natural order, etc.

agreed.

i was reading a post today where a women recalled getting her morgage in the 50's and it requiering a mans signiture! unbeliveable by todays standards.

That was true as late as the 1970s.

In the late 70s my mums (higher) wage couldn't be considered for a mortgage application, only my dads. Breaks my heart that so many people consider feminism irrelevant.