“Ending Child, Early and Forced Marriage – A World Where All Girls can Reach Their Full Potential”

I want to commend Italy, Canada, Zambia, Yemen, and UN FBA for calling together this meeting. I agree with everything that has been said, so my short comments will focus on just three or four things. One is that we speak of child early and forced marriage - it’s girl child early and forced marriage. It's about girls. I emphasise this because this refocuses our entire development aid, our entire domestic policies and development aid. It has to be focused on girls. We have to start deciding that we start from the girls. There is lot of research that shows this is very important for the communities. But it’s really girls who should be the focal point here.

Secondly, child forced marriage is not a cultural idiosyncrasy, it's a form of violence and it’s a form of slavery. And if we think of Europe, hundred years ago, few hundred years ago before the migrations, you also had child forced marriages. So it is not something that is culture-specific and shouldn’t be touched. It's just a human custom that happens all over the world and throughout history, and should and can be eradicated.

Finally, I think that we need to focus on domestic legislation, domestic policies, as a number people here said, integrating different ministries, but we also have to focus on the development aid around the world on girls who are the victims and through them the whole communities who are the victims of early marriages and forced marriages.  And absolutely, from Niger we saw it was the father who needed persuading, not the mother. The mother knew what it was all about; it is the fathers we need to get on our side.

Thank you.