Child marriage remains a pressing global concern. In India, there are twenty-three million child brides, the highest number in the world, and while most Indian states have shown decline in incidence of child marriage in the last ten years, statistics from Rajasthan indicate that it continues to be on the rise there. National Family Health Survey (2015-16) data shows that 26.8% of girls in India are married before their 18th birthday; in Rajasthan, the percentage of such girls is 35%. Rajasthan’s state government has pledged  to make the state child-marriage free in the coming decade, but many of these young girls lack resources to leave marriages they were forced into.

Saarthi Trust was responsible for facilitating the first ever annulment of a child marriage in India in 2012. Started by Jodhpur-based rehabilitation psychologist, Dr. Kriti Bharti in 2011, the organization has subsequently been instrumental towards annulling 36 child marriages and preventing thousands from happening in Rajasthan. Recognizing that annulment of marriage was only part of the solution for the former child brides’ futures, Bharti established a rehabilitation program where the girls are given shelter, food, water, and counseling along with equipping them with educational and vocational skills to infuse their lives with new hope.

Bharti’s unwavering dedication towards fighting child marriage despite receiving death threats and encountering countless obstacles is shaped by her past, her faith, and her dream of “a society where all are free to fly in an open sky, unshackled from the handcuffs of exploitation and abuse.”

I spoke to her in Jodhpur to learn more about her journey.

How did you embark on this journey? What has made you so passionately involved?

I had a difficult childhood. My father abandoned me before my birth and my mother was under great  pressure from my relatives to abort me. I endured much verbal and physical abuse while growing up. When I was ten years old, I got poisoned and was bedridden for months; I recovered only due to Reiki therapy two years later. It was then I took my first revolutionary step in life by renouncing my surname and adopting Bharti instead: it means daughter of India, reflecting my disavowal of any caste or community.

I studied Psychology in college in Jodhpur, where we would offer counseling to different NGOs; I felt that I was meant for this life. I worked with various NGOs before starting Saarthi Trust in 2011.

I believe that the inner transformations which I experienced during childhood turned me from a victim into a survivor. I didn’t have someone to protect me then, I too needed a Kriti Bharti in my life. These children will, though, and as much as is possible, I will help them.

Could you tell me more about your fight against child marriage?

I fight abuse of any kind and in case of child marriage, it happens to encompass many pressing issues such as sexual abuse, child labor, education, and health.

While Rajasthan is known for its cultural heritage and beauty, the fact remains that it is one of the most backward states in India with many malpractices against women occurring there: child marriage, female feticide, sexual exploitation, and unequal educational opportunities. We are working to change the mindset wherever we go for there is a lot to be done. However, I take positives from the fact that the first child marriage annulment in India happened in Rajasthan too, hopefully becoming a catalyst  for other changes.

Do you think child marriage is on the decline? What role has government played in the situation? What do you think will really bring about change?

There has been no decline in child marriage. What I have seen on field and in government-recorded data are two entirely different things. Let’s say the administration receives information that a child marriage will be occurring somewhere; they will prevent it from happening along with counselling the parents, recording it that they did so. Yet, I have encountered many instances where the administration prevented the marriage from occurring but the ceremony nevertheless happened anyway few days later. Nowadays the families organizing the weddings have become very savvy: there are no photographers, no wedding invitations printed and very few people invited to the wedding. If you don’t have evidence that a wedding took place, how can you prove it? I feel that a strict follow up is required once the wedding has been stopped, the administration must vigilantly monitor the children involved until they turn 18 and 21 years old [legally permissible age for marriage in India].

There has been no decline in child marriage. What I have seen on field and in government-recorded data are two entirely different things.
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A child marriage happens when a girl-child is perceived as a burden in her family, believing she should be married off into another family and become their responsibility. One can’t attribute it to lack of education; I have seen it happening in educated families too. Those performing child marriages don’t want to leave behind tradition, they still would like to uphold it at any cost. The women involved say, it happened with us too and all was fine. A child bride once told her mother, “I experience pain in sexual activities, my husband beats me too,” and her mother responded, “you will have to endure it, like I did.” The mothers themselves don’t realize that what they experienced was abuse and exploitation. As it is, a girl grows up conditioned to living a life of restrictions and marriage subsequently becomes an extension of that of adjustment.

While the focus so far has been on stopping child-marriages, I believe that they are no less than a disease and I want to focus on a curative approach by eradicating them in the first place.

You have received so many death threats. Why are people so threatened? What keeps you going nonetheless?

Those who are threatened are those who promote child marriage at any cost: the families of the children involved, politicians, and community leaders. The grooms’ families are getting a daughter in law, the politicians are thinking of vote-banks and in the meantime, community leaders believe that they are the court, having the right to make decision for people’s lives. They also accrue financial benefits by allowing child marriages to take place. If family resists getting their daughter married and supports her, community-leaders threaten to ostracize and ask them to pay hefty fines up to 20 lakh rupees (US$ 29, 200). The families are often daily-wage earners, how will they raise such a huge amount?

As for what keeps me going on, given my past, I have seen life and death very closely; after all, I was close to death even before being born. I have also seen exploitation at close hand. That inner fear of death has gone having endured what I have. But those who threaten me do not realise the struggles I have experienced and how they have strengthened my resolve to fight child marriage. These death threats now no longer affect me; in fact, they have become a part of my life.

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What has been your biggest success? What has been your biggest challenge? Has there been a moment when you wanted to give up?

I am most happy when a child gets her marriage annulled. I see her being liberated from the shackles of an untimely bond and learning to see life as being full of golden opportunities instead.

Yes, there have been many times when I felt stuck; I need a lot of courage and optimism to see myself through those times and I derive it from my strong faith in God.

One of my most challenging times was when I rescued a girl, Sushila Bishnoi at 4am from the highway in Barmer district which is 300 km from Jodhpur in 2016. Sushila was twelve years old, wanting to get her marriage annulled. After acquiring her legal custody with great difficulty, the real challenge came about proving Sushila’s marriage. Her father was a criminal and knew how to circumvent the law; he declared that there had been no marriage, just talk of engagement. No villager in the meantime was willing to testify against the family in fear of violent retribution. How could I annul her marriage when there no marriage had supposedly taken in the first place?

I see her being liberated from the shackles of an untimely bond and learning to see life as being full of golden opportunities instead.
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The family threatened to kidnap me too amongst issuing other threats. I was wondering how to overcome the situation given that there was no evidence whatsoever to prove the marriage. It was then Facebook came to my rescue; I looked up Sushila’s husband and discovered he updated daily on Facebook. We sifted through seven years worth of updates to see if there were any incriminating pictures or comments which could help us prove the fact that he was married. We eventually collected evidence and presented it the to court. The annulment happened last year. Her family however refused to support Sushila and she has been with me since.

Laxmi Sargara was the first woman in India to annul her child marriage. What has been the impact?

We conduct orientation camps across Rajasthan raising awareness about why child marriages are bad. Lot of media coverage has helped too. We run a helpline to encourage anyone to report about the occurrence of a child marriage. No matter how dire their situation, the girls somehow contact me or someone else informs us.

In case of Laxmi, she was an 18 year old child-bride and did not want to go to her in laws’ home; she ran away from home and asked me for help to get out of the marriage. Divorce was a huge stigma for a woman in a rural set up and I wanted to find a permanent and alternate solution. Everyone told me that I was wasting my time, I should just get the brides divorced. However, I was clear about differentiating between divorce and cancellation of a marriage. I wanted to return to the girl her dignity and singlehood: she had never been married because what she had experienced was not a marriage. I researched extensively and learnt of the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act (2006), which allows child marriage to be nullified provided either of the individuals appeal to the court within two years of maturity. It was just that not many people knew about it and which we took avail of in Laxmi and others’ cases.

Only Laxmi has married again. The other girls are all focused on their careers, committed to being economically independent. They are not interested in marriage right now. They recognise that marriage is a part of life, not life itself.

Content warning: descriptions of child abuse

The clinic I took my sister to is housed in a new building; it has abstract paintings on its very white walls and overly quirky sodas in the waiting room. Pain management clinics that pedal opiates strive to look respectable.

If all goes as planned, this clinic will prescribe the opiates that she will become addicted to—again. They will dull her constant physical pain. They will dull her psychological torment—the particular trait that makes them so attractive to so many. The doctors involved in prescribing them largely overlook the psychological torment, however; a narrow view of a very complicated problem makes for convenient medical treatment. It makes for compelling media narratives.

It makes for more addicts.

I could start the story of my sister’s addiction by talking about the first pain management clinic she went to, 10 years ago. The one where the doctor was eventually arrested for trading prescriptions for cash. She was prescribed an ever-increasing dose of oxycontin, oxycodone, and eventually a fentanyl patch along with oral narcotics. She became a slow-motion zombie who nodded off while standing, lost her balance, and broke bones from falling. In the time it took her to enunciate a simple sentence, she would forget what she was trying to say. She lost her job, then her health insurance, and, finally, access to her prescription opiates. She spent a week dope sick, without any medical care, and emerged sober.

But that’s only part of The Opiate Story.

My sister’s story of addiction began when she was 4, when the sexual abuse began. A relative would creep into her bedroom at night; so much abuse at such a young age affected the way her pelvic muscles developed. Children lack the words to describe such violations of body, mind, and soul, and like most victims of sexual abuse, she never told anyone as a child. When she finally grew up and told our mother, she didn’t believe her. And because she was abused in New York, the state’s statute of limitations on the crime kept her from pressing charges as an adult.

Her angry, depressed childhood and angry, depressed teenaged years culminated in some pretty severe bouts of anorexia and a suicide attempt at college. But with the help of campus mental health services and continued distance from her home, she gained psychological distance from the abuse, got a decent job, and tasted a semblance of healthy adulthood.

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In her mid twenties, she developed severe pelvic pain, which baffled experts for years. It started out as debilitating menstrual pain, something doctors minimize. Pretty soon it started before her period, lasted beyond it, and then would happen a few random times throughout the month. Within the course of a year she was experiencing severe pain every day, absolutely confounding a growing list of doctors and specialists.

She finally went to one of the best medical centers in the nation for a diagnosis and treatment plan. She saw five specialists the first day there, and at least two of them asked her, point-blank, if she was sexually abused as a child. One of them explained exactly how penetration at such a young age—as well as the struggles against it—can warp the development of pelvic muscles. They explained that an office job which required sitting for hours caused a change in muscle tone that had snowballed into her chronic, debilitating pain.

Children lack the words to describe violations of body, mind, and soul.
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After my sister was diagnosed, the doctors at the medical center said she would need treatment with opiates. They discussed a nerve block, but she was too young and otherwise healthy. They suggested physical therapy and acupuncture too, which didn’t work. Debilitating pain was managed with debilitating doses of opiates. Two bad options, but the opiates made her less miserable.

After she lost her job, she moved back to the same house she was sexually abused in, with emotionally brutal parents who weren’t sympathetic to her plight. She applied for Social Security Disability, a process that takes years in New York.

There isn’t much academic research about the adult life of child sexual abuse survivors, but existing research and anecdotes imply her life is fairly typical. The Adverse Childhood Experiences study of the 1990s proved that child sexual abuse—along with nine other childhood traumas—have lifelong, significant, and surprising impacts on the health and futures of those grown children. Earlier research documented the increased risk of mental illness and drug abuse. But the increased risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and COPD that the ACE study documented were surprising, especially when other risk factors were corrected for. Absenteeism from work and serious financial hardship were even more surprising.

And one of the more obscure metrics? The study linked childhood trauma to chronic physical pain.

At every pain clinic my sister has visited, she talks about the abuse in as few well-rehearsed, stilted words as possible, trying not to cry. And always the doctor says, “It’s OK, we see this all the time here.”

In the 1990s the “war on drugs”—when crack cocaine was framed as Public Enemy #1—was blamed, in part, on youth culture. The “just say no” campaigns targeted kids, while the DARE program, and the phrase “peer pressure,” ingrained itself into our vocabulary. Fast forward a decade, when methamphetamine threatened to gobble up Appalachia and inner cities that had just survived crack.

This time poverty shouldered the blame, and pop culture gave us Breaking Bad.

Now, America is in the midst of an opiate epidemic that is drastically thinning our ranks. America’s mean lifespan is declining, largely due to opiate overdoses and suicide. People are willingly casting off their mortal coil, or only persisting in it if they can numb the hell out of it.

We love blaming the evil pharmaceutical companies that flooded America’s streets with very dangerous, very addictive painkillers under the false pretenses of safety. They deserve it; but it’s also crucial to note that only 25% of America’s current opiate addicts got started using legally prescribed medications—progressive addiction to alcohol, street drugs, or illegally distributed prescription medication are responsible for the rest. Addiction, something a leading addiction researcher wants to rename “ritualized compulsive comfort-seeking,” is often a direct, logical consequence of childhood trauma.

Pharmaceutical companies aren’t the only villains; adults who sexually abuse children only get convicted about 20% of the time. Our national disinterest in preventing other forms of child abuse and childhood trauma is reckless and immoral.

Maternal home visiting programs—which provide the parents most likely to abuse their children with emotional support, life skills, parenting skills, and case management—actually prevent abuse from starting, and prevent most Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). They dramatically improve the lives of children and their families. But at least 90% of eligible families are not served by the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting program (MIECHV). Even the Titanic had enough lifeboat seats to save half its passengers. After the Titanic sank we made changes; why don’t we have a national discourse or hear a peep from our elected leaders when thousands of children die directly from abuse, and millions are cursed with ACEs every year?

Meanwhile I’m left struggling to decide if opiate addiction is my sister’s best, or worst, option.

I remember her addicted. Her skin was nearly numb, all the time, but her scalp itched constantly. She would scratch it until she gouged out chunks of flesh, leaving open sores and streaks of pink in her blond hair, and dried blood and skin shards under her chipped nails. She would fall over. She could barely speak in sentences. And I was always worried about her overdosing.

When my sister lost her job, she lost her health insurance. Eventually she got Medicaid, but for a few months she had no coverage. No coverage meant no legal opiates. She went through withdrawal (no clinic in a two-hour radius was willing to take her), and started life without any heavy-duty opiates. Her pain stabilized, and between alcohol and some low-level narcotics she was able to get through the day.

But for reasons unknown to me or her doctors, her pain suddenly became worse, and her anorexia is relapsing. She went from a size 12 to a size two in a matter of weeks. The last time my sister was anorexic she was so weak I couldn’t hear her voice unless she was sitting next to me. She’d pass out from low blood sugar. It’s a familiar refrain; her entire life has been, essentially, slipping from one self-destructive coping mechanism to another and hoping no one will notice.

Our national disinterest in preventing child abuse is reckless and immoral.
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While addiction is always a source of shame, anorexia is a source of pride. It is the execution of something most women want to accomplish, a prize most women covet. I know from personal experience that anorexia is a sort of mind game that can only be played by a very active, very discontent mind. Anorexia—not depression or substance-abuse disorder—is considered the deadliest mental illness.

The option I want for my sister is a genuinely healthy life. But she has no clear path to that. For her, a healthy life requires income allowing her to live on her own. It requires trauma specific therapy, psychotherapy, psychiatry, and pain management. It requires a community where child abuse victims are believed. Where their wrecked lives are considered evidence as readily as a burglary victim’s shattered window. A community where abuse victims have access to justice and compensation whenever they’re ready for it.

Under her scars and scabs and tattoos and snark, my sister is still there. My other half, my best friend, the only person I’ve ever trusted, the only healthy, long-term relationship I’ve ever had. The person who can make me laugh by reciting a joke I heard when I was 14. The person who will ask me how I am and can tell if I’m lying when I say “fine.”

Like millions of others my sister needs to figure out how to play the hand she was dealt. I don’t know a better way for her to play it.

For now I’ll help her get opiates.