News

Working meeting of the project implementing partners and session of the Steering Committee under the “Prevention of early marriages” project of Center Amalipe (Bulgaria), Liga Pro Europa (Romania) and ARSIS (Greece) supported by DG Justice of the European Commission within Daphne 2009 program took place in Sofia on July 15, 16 and 17.

The event was implemented on two stages. On 15 and 16 of July was conducted the working meeting of the partners organizations Center Amalipe, Liga Pro Europa (represented by Ms. Smaranda Enache – human rights activist, former ambassador of Romania to Finland and Estonia and her associates, Ms. Judit Kacso, jurist and Katalin Szikszai, ethnologist) and Association for social support of Youths – ARSIS (represented by Anastassia Arapidou, and her legal associate Ms. Andromahi Moutsina).

The partners presented findings from the researches that were conducted under the project within their country territories. The commonality between the reports in the areas that indicate lack of straight forward State policies regarding the prevention of forced and early marriages shows that strong efforts should be targeted at engaging the States in understanding the problem and in providing a working model for prevention of this negative phenomenon. However, the positive outcome is that though there are shortcomings in the policies, the State institutions seem keen to cooperate with other stakeholders in addressing the issue, including the Roma community. The researches also show similarities within the Roma communities in Greece, Romania and Bulgaria in regard that the Roma community is in a transition period between the traditional patriarchal and modern family patterns. This creates favorable environment for interventions that prevent early marriages and foster Roma modernization.

The partners discussed also future actions that will be implemented under the project: elaboration of educational materials, public awareness campaigns, national advocacy conferences and concluding international conference.  

In the afternoon on 16^th and on 17^th of July the second session of the Project Steering Committee has been conducted. Milen Milanov (National Coordinator of the Decade of Roma Inclusion), Kalin Kamenov (Deputy Chair of the State Agency for Child Protection), Georgi Krastev (Deputy Chair of the National Council for Cooperation on Ethnic and Demographic Issues), Petar Atanasov (head of the newly formed department “Integration of Ethnic Minorities” within the MLSP),  representatives of NGOs (National Network for Children, SAPI, Gender Project, Association “Integro”, Foundation “Sham”) and others took part in the session.  The participants were acknowledged with the Bulgarian national sociological survey regarding the Roma marital attitudes in Bulgaria as well with the implemented field researches, conducted interviews with State officials at the local, regional and national levels and Roma community members regarding the issue of early marriages in Romania, Greece and Bulgaria.

Center Amalipe presentations showing reasons and preconditions for conducting of early marriages, raised lively discussion among the participants from the side of institutions’ representatives, especially the part that research the social workers and teacher’s attitudes towards the Roma early marriages and cooperation among different authorities and the Roma community regarding implementation of preventive activities. The survey clearly shows that the field workers face many difficulties in their work with Roma community mainly in lack of coordination with other State institutions and, as their contingent is mainly marginalized families, some of them formed prejudices and stereotypes that they transfer to the Roma as a whole. Representatives of the NGO sector (NCN, SAPI) also confirmed that those troubles within the child protection system have been revealed in other surveys and researches. All of the national institutions representatives express their will to cope with these negative attitudes and to assure better effectiveness in dealing with the issue of early marriages.

The most interesting part of the presentations that has raised discussions was the revealed tendency in marital attitudes among the Roma in Bulgaria. Four different indicators (raising the age of first marital cohabitation, straightforward relationship between educational level and marital age, predominate tendency family to be created by the will of the youths  rather than parents and unequivocal preponderance of simple family households over extended family households) clearly reveals the tendency that the Roma community undergo modernization changes.

"There are still large sections of the community who share traditional patriarchal models, but they tend to reduce in favor of modern families – emphasize D. Kolev. - Now is the right time for the prevention of early marriage, prevention of school dropout, etc., because there is a supportive environment and it will help the development of the community!”

Similar conclusions have been raised by the partners’ presentation from Romania and Greece. The marital age there is still lower but the tendency for its rise up is clear. The problems of early marriages, lack of coordinated State policy in those countries as well as the need to improve the measures implemented by the field workers showed that important steps should be undertaken for overcoming the problem.   

The second day of the Steering Committee session concluded with the presentations of local campaigns that are implemented in 10 localities in Bulgaria aimed at preventing early marriages. Each one of the activists implementing local campaigns spoke about the implemented activities, solved cases and about the impact on the community. It turned out that the presentation of positive examples, conversations and discussions (with young people and their parents), “door to door” campaigns lead not only to supporting the trend to overcome early marriages, but also to increase enrollment in schools (including secondary education), prevention of the  dropping out rate and to a more complex change in the community. The informal position of Community Moderator, that young Roma activists’ implement now, needs to be institutionalized - it will help the community self-organization, and will make the system of social institutions more effective, participants indicated.

The main outcomes of the campaigns implementation so far is the successfully redressed cases of potential early marriages that was going to emerge if no actions by the persons implementing local campaigns was done. The main tendencies from the campaigns implementation show that education is a substitute to the early and forced marriage as an alternative in social and personal realization and it serves as one of the best preventive measures in practice.

The project implementation shall continue with preparation of educational materials based on the experience and models for prevention tested in the ten localities: brochures, posters, fliers and a movie. Those materials shall be disseminated among the different stakeholders including institutions and the Roma community and will be announced on national conferences in the three implementing countries. The educational materials will be used to conduct awareness raising campaigns aimed at changing the public policies towards the issue and helping the Roma community in their transition from patriarchal led family patterns into modern ones.