@Glennn,
You have stories of girls in countries that have been colonized. The traditional cultures have been mixed with modern institutions... the modern wins in sometimes very harmful ways.
But how do you account for the story of what happened pre-colonial cultures when the Colonial powers were just arriving? The indigenous cultures were functioning cultures that had every right to exist before the White people came. This is an account of Australian aboriginal culture.
Quote:Traditionally, small bands of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers adhered to a strict kinship system that afforded protection, autonomy and respect to girls and women, says anthropologist Diane Bell, who has written several books on Aboriginal women. Young girls in arranged marriages to older men would be protected by overseeing co-wives and a semi-public life in open-air camps, which ensured that relatives would come running, spears in hand, should sounds of violence echo across the desert.
This traditional Aboriginal culture has been “bastardized and brutalized,” says Aboriginal professor Judy Atkinson, who has exposed the extent of violence against Aboriginal women in books and government reports. British colonizers arrived on the continent in 1788, unleashing disease, slaughter and merciless programs of forced assimilation. Aboriginals were dispossessed and herded onto densely packed government settlements and missions in a colonization that vanquished the 1 million-strong Aboriginal population to about 60,000 by the 1920s.
To “protect” Aboriginal children from “evil Aboriginal culture,” between 1910 and 1970, state authorities took as many as a third of all Aboriginal infants and children from their families, in what is now being referred to as a “stolen” generation. “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” a film that opens today in New York and Los Angeles, recounts this period in Australian history.
Here we had a functional aboriginal culture. People prospered with their own traditions, including child marriage, until White people came. I would argue that the cruelty was not caused by aboriginal traditional culture... but by the fact that that culture was dominated by a new culture.
I can not argue that in post-colonial societies, such as modern day Ethiopia or rural India, that child marriage makes sense. But this is because our world is now dominated by Western culture... Western culture permeates the modern world for better or for worse. I concede the argument for anyone living in the post-colonial world.
But look at the legacy of how we got here. Child marriages were ended by cultural subjugation, Christianization, forced schools. Indigenous children were literally kidnapped from their families by Australia, Canada and the United States to get them to give up their cultures. Is this kidnapping justified if that is what it takes to end the traditional practice of marriage?
I don't accept that the marriage practices of pre-colonial indigenous cultures... before the dominance of Western Culture and the reality that has created... were inferior to the Western Colonizers of whom you and I are direct cultural descendants.
These voices have been largely snuffed out. You can still find them in anthropology books.
