empowering the child brides through education. For the girls who were married to the men that raped them it was difficult to proceed with education. This impacted on their employment prospects Some respondents revealed that parents would chase away their child under the assumption that if they sent that child to school she could not achieve much because she had been raped and traumatised. Hence when they got married, they would become mere housewives, fully dependent on the husband financially. All of the child bride respondents reported that their daily work and chores caused them to “suffer”, while only five (26%) of the non-child brides felt the same towards work and household chores. The marriages were so dominated by spousal conflicts and disagreement to the extent that most child bride respondents found it “difficult to make decisions” about their lives. Some child brides left the abusive husbands but did not return to their original families and people did not know where they went afterwards. According to some respondents, the child brides who fled abusive marriages mostly ended up as prostitutes or street kids in other towns. According to respondents girls were rushing into marriage whilst very young. As a result, the child brides would not have even an Ordinary level certificate or a vocational training certificate. According to both child brides and non-child brides, children were interested in living a high life dominated by materialism and consumerism yet they cannot afford that kind of life. The inevitable result of the materialism was that the girls got into marriages and became entirely dependent on the husband. When that husband withdrew his money and began to neglect the child bride poverty ensued. Such poverty would be deep-seated and difficult to deal with for the child brides since they would usually be residing in completely new locations far from their families and friends who can help them with money or in kind. As one older respondent summarised “…she will grow up and age whilst her life is full of problems”. According to respondents, most households were finding life tough due to the economic hardships affecting the nation. Some families were farming on their pieces of land and were able to sell some of their produce. However, others lamented the low rainfall that Goromonzi had received in successive seasons recently and said agriculture was no longer producing as much yields as in the past. For many families it had become impossible to make a living from subsistence agriculture. Other families were struggling to buy inputs for their fields and had to work as labourers in other people’s fields in exchange for money. One particular respondent expressed her dislike of working as a farm/field labourers saying it was painful and its rewards were not commensurate with the level of effort invested. Other respondents indicated that they were surviving on proceeds from income generating projects such as hair salons at Majuru growth point in Goromonzi. Other respondents indicated that they were dependent on the earnings of one or more individuals who were involved in the informal economy in activities such as ad-hoc panel beating, fixing cars, spray painting tubs and working as farm labour. Another respondent expressly said her family was poor as they did not have anything to do to improve their livelihood and that even if she was to find work she had no one to leave in charge of her home in her absence. While some respondents were dependent on remittances from their children in South Africa, others indicated that they did not hold their breath for those remittances since times were also tough for those children in the diaspora. 22