VNExpress-July 4
Vu Thi Hoa, who has been teaching at Long Luong Secondary School for over 10 years, gets two or three wedding invitations from both male and female students every year. Many of them drop out of school right after getting married, some stay to finish that school year before dropping out. Hoa says she never attends those “child marriages” and “loves” and “is mad at the students at the same time.” Her school is right on National Highway 6, but the majority of her students live on the other side of the rugged mountain range, in Ta De and Lung Xa villages, which is known for being drug hotspots. Hoa and her colleagues are determined to persuade students living in the drug-infested Long Luong Commune to attend school. Every time they go out to campaign, the teachers must ask a few students to accompany them just to get into someone’s house. Often, they would encounter parents high on drugs and have to leave disappointed. According to the findings of a 2019 survey on the socio-economic situation of the 53 ethnic minority groups in Vietnam, the H’Mong ethnic group had the highest rate of child marriage at 51.5 percent, indicating that one out of every two H’Mong people married underage. In Vietnam, the permissible ages for marriage are 18 for women and 20 for men. Child marriage is no longer confined to remote villages or small communities. According to the World Bank, child marriage will cost developing countries like Vietnam trillions of dong in healthcare, lost incomes and decreased labor market productivity by 2030. And at schools, teachers like Hoa have only one concern: if her students marry young, they will drop out. National studies show that this fear of teachers is completely justified. In fact, the lower the average years of schooling for an ethnic group, the higher its rate of child marriage. Read more at: https://e.vnexpress.net/news/trend/where-children-opt-for-marriage-over-school-4482837.html
