huge number of mothers and aunts had effectively abdicated their traditional functions of protecting and nurturing girls into becoming good women. According to the respondents from the FGDs, the age difference between the child brides and the older men was usually so large that the girl would be young enough to be a daughter to the husband. Several responses aptly drive home this view commonly held among respondents: “…ivo madhara iwaya anendebvu anenge akagara mumota akagukuchira mwana mudiki iye ariye munhu mukuru anofanirwa kucounsellor mwana” meaning the old men with big bellies should be the ones to counsel their children instead of being involved in relationships with them and “…at some funeral I went to the man who was said to be the son-in-law was so old his death was really imminent.” According to some Focus Group Discussants, when a “mudhara” (older man) was interested in a particular girl, he would buy groceries for the mother of the child so that the mother would entice her daughter to seduce that man. One respondent described how another woman tried to coerce her daughter into marrying an older man. Even though the girl cried and refused, the mother insisted and refused to pay the child’s examination fees only to regret it later after discovering that man was putting up appearances and did not have the wealth he was pretending to have. One child bride said she accepts that her reasoning and intellect were not yet fully developed at the time she agreed to be married as a child bride. The parents, especially the mothers, were not bothered by the age dynamic and would view their daughter only in an instrumental perspective and showed no regard for the girls’ desires, fears or whether or not the older husband would abuse her in that said marriage. However, this perception is not matched by the data from the interviews with the individual respondents. Here it was the case that those respondents that reported being child brides were not married to much older men: for the five cases, none of the husbands were older than 25, and the women were all older than 15. 3.2.8 Religious coercion Several respondents who claimed to belong to the Johanne Marange Apostolic sect gave an interesting insight into child marriage within their church. They laid the biggest blame on virginity testing which they said was done by the church “kurukova”/ by the river/stream. In this process, girls were forced to undergo virginity testing, and those so found to be virgins were encouraged to marry “normal” ordinary boys with whom they would have developed love relations on their own accord. However, the girls who would be deemed to have lost their virginity were the given over to the old man to be married as second wives. “What I know is that those who are given in marriage are the ones who would have been found to not be virgins when they are checked for virginity at the river, those are the ones who are married off to old men. No, let me explain, I was a member of that church for years, the church elders come and pray for you and start asking you questions about your identity and who you are with and if you tell them they will not give you rest they will follow you until you give in”. 16