In 2019, Indonesia ranked second in ASEAN for the highest number of child marriages, with 45.1 million victims of child marriage. 3.6 million of them were under 15 years when they were forced into marriage. Yet, people never take action and think of it as a normal situation.

The Indonesian Family Planning Association (PKBI), is a non-governmental organization (NGO) that works across 26 provinces in the country on issues such as women’s health, sexual rights and reproductive health, maternal mortality rate and child marriage.

As a social evangelist, PKBI wanted to challenge this status quo and make people realise that child marriage should be stopped.

"Marrying young" is common among people in rural areas. But nobody batters an eyelid because they assumed it means "getting married at 17 or 18 years old because they want to."

However, "marrying young" actually means child marriage that was forced onto children as young as 9 years old. Because their parents want to have one less mouth to feed and avoid other financial responsibilities.

This film is an audio-visual experience that tells a different story if you close your eyes. It forces the audience to open their eyes, literally and metaphorically. Because if they keep their eyes closed, child marriage will keep on happening around them.

The film is extremely interactive, and plays with sensorial cues of sound and sight to create a heard-hitting impact on the audience. In a brutally simple way, it brings into realisation the horrific reality of child marriage.

Child marriage is an ugly truth of the society we live in. According to Ministry of Women's Empowerment and Child Protection, 11.2% of 79.6 million children in Indonesia are married before the age of 18 years. 34.5% of child marriages occur in the 10-15 year age group.

According to another NGO - Child, not Brides, “Child marriage can be found in every region in the world, from the Middle East to Latin America, South Asia to Europe. Some 12m girls are married before the age of 18 each year.” -

Behaviour change towards child marriage at the grassroots level can only happen when we can establish public opinion against the practice. To do this, the campaign was targeted towards the larger Indonesia society, and more importantly, parents of the girl child.

Our approach was to deliver a disruptive message that shakes the audience to their core.

Being an NGO with limited means, PKBI was never in a position to spend much on the campaign. We produced the film on a shoe-string budget.

The film was released on 12th December 2019, on the PKBI youtube channel.

Scalability was always going to be a challenge. There was no media budget to boost the views. Getting organic views was our only option. To do this, we used PR as a tool to reach a wider audience, so that it could become part of public conversation and consciousness.

Following the campaign, the Government of Indonesia committed to end child marriage in Indonesia. Reduction of child marriage is one of the targets set in the National Mid-term Development Plan from 2020 to 2024. The government also pledged its support to the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations which has called for a global action to end the human rights violation by 2030.

As we seeded the campaign through our PR machinery, we were able to get around 100,000 views on Youtube alone.

The trade media gave us some critical acclaim, which increased public interest in the campaign.

https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/ad-week-child-marriage-summed-harrowing-30-seconds/1676247

https://designtaxi.com/news/408973/Innocent-Seeming-Ad-Is-Really-A-Disturbing-PSA-About-Problematic-Child-Marriage/

https://adage.com/creativity/work/indonesian-family-planning-association-stop-child-marriage/2243076