Rewire's Emily Douglas speaks with Maria Hinojosa about her new documentary on child marriage for NOW on PBS, "Child Brides, Stolen Lives." Maria Hinojosa, an award-winning journalist and author, has been a senior correspondent at NOW since 2005.

Emily Douglas: I read that, astonishingly, the vast majority of sexually active girls aged 15 to 19 in developing countries are married. Could you outline the scope of this problem as you experienced it in your travels?

Maria Hinojosa: What we realized – based on our conversations with people who were central to this project, people at the International Center for Research on Women – is that the issue of child marriage, looked at from the root of the problem – which is the essence of looking at anything radically – the root of girl's and women's powerlessness in society begins at the moment when they are married off as children. It's at that moment when they lose all of their power because they are now married and subjugated to a man. They can't go to school so they remain uneducated and illiterate, they can't get a job, because they can't work outside of the home, they are susceptible being victims of domestic abuse because they have no place to go, they are susceptible to getting AIDS because their husbands are sexually active outside the marriage and bring the illness home, they are susceptible to the social isolation and the consequent feeling of insecurity and deprivation and lack of self-esteem because they have nowhere else to go. Once they're married they're tied to this man. You're not just talking about decades where this has been going on, you're talking about centuries. And [in India, for instance] you're talking about little girls being married off when they are three or four years old, which is what I witnessed. Not married to men, but to little boys. But that's their life; it's over at that point. That's why the problem is so huge, because it's the essence of what leaves a sector of women powerless, poor, and illiterate for the rest of their lives, and it begins with child marriage.

ED: You were saying it hasn't been going on for decades, but for centuries. Is that true for all of the regions of the world that have child marriage – that it's a centuries-long tradition, or in some places a more recent phenomenon?

MH: It's hard to make a determination. The point is that in a modern-day world, where we are supposed to be providing options for all human beings, the fact that girls from poor areas around the world don't have any options except for the option of marriage, that's a problem. That's where we are now – in a modern day world where we still have large sections of society that don't have any options.

ED: Are families ever allies in trying to keep their daughters from early marriage? Or do families tend to perceive an economic benefit or some other benefit to marrying the daughter young?

MH: It depends on the family that you're talking to. You don't have coalitions of families coming together to prevent marriage – that's not the scenario that makes itself known. In many cases – for example, the families of the two little girls that I saw, they were married at midnight in a small town near Rajasthan, in India, married at midnight. We don't have their exact ages but they were three or four years old, marrying boys who were six or seven. But we understood, when we spoke to the families, that their future husbands came from a good family. And so that notion of "this boy comes from a good family" is a guarantee for the future of this girl. You're talking about very poor people, who don't have…anything at all. If you don't have anything, at all, what are you going to pay to your future in-laws?

ED: I've read about some instances where girls have no idea that they are going to be married off, but are there communities in which girls know that they are going to be married and they try to prevent it? And are they ever successful?

MH: A lot of them run away. In Niger, in particular, we heard many stories of girls running away. The problem is where do they run to, and how far can they get, when they're from a small village, and they've never been outside of that village for their whole life, and they're thirteen or fourteen years old? You really are talking about the world where it's very different from what we experience. Being a woman alone, anywhere, is just not acceptable.

ED: Did you become familiar in your travels with some of the interventions that local and international groups are doing to prevent or address child marriage, or to work with married girls?

MH: We focused on one – which is thinking, really, from an activist, grassroots perspective – which I think was the most fascinating. The Emir, or King, of the province known as Gobir, which includes the northwest of Niger and Nigeria. It's a 5,000 year old dynasty that covers an area of land the size of Niger but it includes other countries outside of Niger. He is a king, he's the real deal, a king with guards who fan him – and he has become a huge advocate speaking out against child marriage because it's so physically damaging to girls, because they end up with fistula. So he has set up, through UNICEF, what they call the "mobile protection brigades" or "good behavior brigades." When they find out that there's going to be a child wedding, they try to have a conversation with the mother and the father, and they basically try to figure out what's going on, and say, look there are other options, things you can do to delay this. [The Emir is involved] because so many girls in Niger are coming down with fistula – they go into labor for four days, five days, six days, they're at home, usually they lose the baby but in the process, from all of the pressure on their bladder, a hole is created after they give birth, or give birth to a dead fetus, they become incontinent for the rest of their lives. And then they are outcasts forever. This horrible thing is what's motivating the King of Gobir.

ED: It seems like social isolation is a huge issue for child brides. Did you have contact with married girls who seemed to be socially isolated and do you have a sense of why this is a particular problem for them, why they have to be more socially isolated than other women who may marry?

MH: This again goes back to powerlessness. Look, I never had a relationship with my mother-in-law because she unfortunately passed before I married my husband – but the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship can be a difficult one under the best of circumstances. It's just a difficult relationship, though one that can work. But now imagine if you are a daughter-in-law where you are, essentially, for her, one more mouth to feed, but what she gets in turn, is a new servant. You are to serve her and her son. In that sense, again, [the child bride] really doesn't have a voice, at all. She is entirely voiceless.

ED: In the course of reporting this story, was there something that surprised you most about your own response to learning about this issue?

MH: I think what was most extraordinary for me was that at first I went through a period, in preparing to write this story, where I got really angry at the moms. I was like, How can I be feeling this? But I did. So I called Leslie Calman at the ICRW who was one of the professors at Barnard College where I went to school – she was head of the Women's Center, she and I have an intellectual rapport. I said, "Leslie, I need your help. I'm really angry at these moms. I look at my daughter who's nine, and how could I, it would break my heart, I couldn't let a man touch her. " And she said, Okay, I understand your anger, but you need to understand – put yourself in their shoes. You have nothing for her. There's nothing you can offer. And there is no school for her to go to. So you, in your best motherly way, are trying to find a way in which this becomes good for her. And that's why if she's going to end up with a man, don't marry her off to a forty-year-old. Marry her off to a nineteen-year-old. Whichever way you can make it work out better. Don't marry her off to the first poor man, marry her to a man who's got a little bit more. These are your options.

ED: It sounds like you spoke with some women who were able to make political connections, they'd connect their personal experience with child marriage with this larger problem of women not having enough power in their society.

MH: Honestly, the women get it. The women understand. Yes, these are small, tiny villages out there. And many women will not ever leave the village. But they may be exposed to seeing other images of women when they go into town. [Through] advertising, they're exposed to seeing what women can do. [For example,] when we asked a group of women around the well pumping water in a small village in Niger, one of the women said, We don't have any say in this! It's our fathers who choose, and then it's our husbands! Anybody understands when they're powerless and, frankly, no one really wants to be that way. The question is, is there an option for them to do anything about it. And if not for them, for the next generation.

NOW on PBS will air "Child Brides, Stolen Lives" on October 12 at 8:30pm. Check here for local listings. And view TV Reality on Rewire for a preview clip of the documentary!