“What priority actions are needed to end child marriage in Malaysia?” Malaysia`s deputy prime minister, who is also minister of women, family and community development, called the marriage an “alleged incident.” Minister Wan Azizah Wan Ismail said last week: “It would be unfair to lynch someone on social media because we are thinking about the issue.” “How does Voice of the Children address child marriage?” “The ministry is seriously concerned about the marriage of minors. The ministry wants to discuss and work with religious councils to review and tighten laws to eliminate the issue of underage marriage,” the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development said in a statement. With regard to the first issue of health risk behaviours, which included the sub-theme of unprotected sex and prenuptial conception, an unmarried pregnant woman is considered a moral abuse in Malaysia, and people perceive unmarried teenage mothers as delinquent by having unmarried sex or engaging in drug addiction or prostitution [21]. Therefore, parents or guardians will try to marry them immediately if they are aware of the pregnancy. Compared to parental motivations reported in previous studies of child marriage in developing countries in South Asia and Africa, the motivations of parents in this study were slightly different. The parents felt that they had no choice but to allow their daughters to marry a posteriori on the basis of a prenuptial conception. On the other hand, parents in the above-mentioned developing countries had the motivation to protect their daughters from sexual assault or prostitution that might have occurred if their daughters had not remained single; thus, parents felt safer as soon as their daughters were married and under the protection of a husband.[7] Another parental motive is that a girl in a family is a financial burden and therefore needs to find a suitor as soon as possible.[22] In this study, we found that in most cases, parents did not pressure their daughters to marry before the age of 18 until they found out they were pregnant. According to Islamic teachings, a man and a woman, when together in private, may, in certain circumstances, be suspected of engaging in immoral activities considered “khalwat” (proximity) and may be prosecuted under the Islamic religion [23]. For one of our participants, this was the reason given for her child marriage; Her parents had discovered that she had participated in an indecent act in private with her future husband and suspected that the couple had engaged in sexual behavior. Therefore, we can conclude that child marriage in Sarawak is seen as a mechanism to prevent young couples from committing further sins and ensure that a girl who becomes pregnant gets married.

In addition, one of the relevant findings of this study is that many girls who became pregnant did not have enough knowledge on how to prevent pregnancy. This finding is consistent with an earlier study of women who experienced early marriage in Iran [24]. Therefore, in order to prevent and reduce unwanted teenage pregnancies, sex education, including information on contraceptive methods, should be encouraged for adolescent girls at school and in the community at an early age when they are experiencing puberty. The previous study identified a lack of knowledge about sexuality and reproductive health among Malaysian adolescents [25]. Therefore, education should focus on what can happen when a couple has sex, as well as the various responsibilities associated with marriage and the birth of children. The challenges faced by other Islamic states, such as Iran and Indonesia, in introducing sex education into schools are based on the idea that teaching sexuality is a taboo [26, 27]. An earlier study reported that there is an aversion in Iran to discussing sexual issues in public, as it is perceived as embarrassing to talk about sexuality and people are concerned about the negative effects of introducing sex education in schools [26]. Second, the results showed that the concept of destiny influenced women`s emotions and minds, influencing their decisions to marry early. This concept of fate as one of the determinants of child marriage has been briefly reported in previous studies [28, 29], but has not been analysed in detail. In this study, women who married before the age of 18 seemed to believe that outside forces were determining their early marriages and that there was nothing they could have done to change the course of their lives. Using the control location as the conceptual framework for this study, we can explain the fateful trait of the women in this study.

Previous studies have focused on the links between religiosity and life satisfaction, with the control site being a mediator [11, 30]. Assuming that the women in this study made decisions about child marriage in a place of external control, it can be assumed that their decisions to marry early were justified and confirmed by their belief that it was their destiny to marry at a young age. In a previous study on child marriage, belief in fate was described as a way for married girls to quickly secure their identity, status and respect in a new post-marriage environment [6]. Another report described the perception of the older generation that the acceptance of early marriage as a destiny shows the servility of girls [31]. In Malaysia, the minimum legal age for civil marriage for both sexes is 18. However, girls can marry at the age of 16 with the permission of the prime minister of their state, while Islamic law sets a minimum age of 16 for girls and even allows older marriages with the permission of the Sharia court. Many of the women in this study dropped out of school long before they married children, mainly due to family poverty. There was also another group of women who had dropped out of school at a young age due to an illegitimate pregnancy. Several of the participants in this study said they left school at an early age, that is. B at the age of 12 or 13, either voluntarily because of their family`s financial situation or because their parents had specifically asked them to leave school because of family poverty. After graduation, some girls helped their families financially by working, while others stayed home and helped with housework and care for younger siblings. The other main reason for leaving school was pregnancy.

The decision to leave was quickly implemented by the parents after discovering the pregnancy. After dropping out of school, one of the participants quickly married the man she had had sex with before the wedding. This month, Malaysian Minister of Islamic Affairs Mujahid Yusof Rawa said his ministry had begun banning child marriage for Muslims, although he warned that implementing such a ban would take time. Malaysian child rights activists said about 15,000 girls under the age of 15 were in child marriage in 2010. Worldwide, UNICEF estimates that there are about 650 million girls and women of various faiths who were married before the age of 18. “Her father never cares about her,” she said. “He doesn`t even like children.” Until this reform, the government should establish a registry to monitor underage marriages and document the reasons why the courts or the prime minister granted this permission. However, the true scale of child marriage in Malaysia may be even higher, as many couples attending religious or habitual marriages fail to register their relationships.

“What makes child marriage such a sensitive issue that needs to be addressed and challenged in Malaysia?” So if you read together, the law basically states that if a man was under the age of 18 at the time of marriage, marriage is not recognized in the eyes of the law. This age limit also applies to women, unless they have obtained permission (in the form of a license issued) from the Prime Minister of their state, although the minimum age is 16 years. By the way, the law also requires each party to get permission from their parents to marry if they have not yet reached the age of 21. If there was no written permission from the Sharia court, the marriage would be illegal, he said. .