April 01, 2014 - Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced on Saturday
that "child marriage-free zones" are to be set up in Pakistan. Brown, the UN's special
envoy on global education, said the practice of forcing girls into marriage is "not
acceptable in the modern world". "It deprives a girl of her education and her childhood,"
he told the BBC. "What we want to do is to encourage girls themselves to be aware
of their rights, to encourage teachers and girls to work together to say that when
people try to force them into early marriage, it's not acceptable," he said. "There
are seven million children who are not going to school," he said. "This is completely
unacceptable in the modern world "And so in Pakistan, we are going to do a pilot
project where we declare an area to a marriage-free zone, a child marriage-free zone."