At the 2013 World Athletics Championships
in Moscow, the 10,000m races have been brilliant events, both men and the
women. Whilst the men’s race was won by the one and only Mo Farah, the women’s
race was won in very convincing style by the ‘baby-faced destroyer’ Tirunesh
Dibaba from Ethiopia.
It was a very impressive victory, not just
because of the amazing sprint she put in on the final 100m, but also because it
is her 5th successive victory over this distance at the World’s –
and they only happen every 2 years, so she has been winning for 10 years. She is
also 2 times Olympic champion, and has a number of wins at 5,000m as well!
But the thing that stood out for me most
was the reason she went into running in the first place. Tirunesh was born in
1985, the 3rd out of 5 children, in a small rural town 260km from
Addis Ababa. Growing up she did the usual Ethiopian thing of running to school,
and it can’t be denied there is running in the family including an Olympic
champion for a cousin, but Tirunesh wasn’t interested in ‘proper’ running herself.
It was only when she went to Addis Ababa to
live with her sister and cousin, and attend a city middle school to further her
education that things changed. Having arrived in Addis 6 days too late to
register for school, she refused to return to her hometown where her parents,
following the tradition of rural Ethiopia, would have forced her to marry and
bear children at an early age.
So instead she remained in Addis Ababa,
joined the running club that her cousin belonged to, and the rest, as they say,
is history.
Forced marriage is a massive issue for
women and girls worldwide, and indeed in the Observer newspaper today there was
an article on this subject written by Lauren Wilks as the winning entry for the
‘human rights student reporter of the year’ competition. Forced marriage, says
Wilks, is largely a hidden problem and statistics represent the tip of the
iceberg…..Those working with survivors speak of the difficulty in identifying
forced marriages, especially since many victims come from places where the
concept of a ‘forced marriage’ does not exist.
In the UK, actions to help tackle the issue
of forced marriage include criminalization, raising awareness, and increased
numbers of safe havens and refuges for those seeking to escape such a life. But
in Ethiopia, for Tirunesh, those options wouldn’t have been available to her.
Reading Tirunesh’s story reminded me of
some of the stories I heard from girls and ladies at Women At Risk (W.A.R) in
Addis a few weeks ago. W.A.R works with sex workers who are seeking to come off
the streets and find a new life for themselves; and meeting some of those
ladies, and hearing their stories was a very moving time. The reasons they went
into prostitution were varied, but some of the ladies were from rural areas, and
I now wonder if the fear of forced marriage was a reason that some of them left
home.
I may never know, and indeed I don’t need
to know; but what is important is that this issue is still very real, abusive
and oppressive for many, and needs awareness being raised about it where
possible. There are many websites out there giving information about it eg http://www.forcedmarriage.net or
Plan-UK’s ‘Because I Am A Girl’ campaign (great for teachers – has a teaching
pack) http://www.plan-uk.org/what-we-do/campaigns/because-i-am-a-girl/
. Many cities have refuges and counseling services that need financial support,
and this can be another way of showing solidarity.
Tirunesh was able to run away from the
threat of a forced marriage – many girls are not: what can each of us do to
help them?
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