We gave thanks last week that senior Chief Inkosi Kachindamoto, a woman, annulled 300 child marriages in Malawi, supporting the country’s new law making 18 the minimum age for marriage in both genders.

Watching several TED Talks yesterday, the subject of Malawi’s child brides surfaced again in the passionate TED Woman2015 talk given by Malawi’s Memory Banda. Memory became an organizer in support of the new law against child marriage, and she also introduced me to the topic of ‘initiation camps’. Banda’s sister, who has three children and two failed marriages at age 16, was sent to an ‘initiation camp’ at age 11.

Memory Banda Speaks Against Child Marriage At TEDWoman 2015

The purpose of the ‘initiation camp’ is simple in that it teaches girls ‘how to sexually please a man’.

CNN wrote about Malawi’s ‘initiation camps’ last year, focusing on Grace, age 10. Like other girls in her village, Grace was not a victim of sex trafficking; nor was she forced to work in the sex trade.

“Everyone makes sure their child goes to initiation ceremony because you will not be accepted in the community,” said Jean Mweba, an education program specialist for reproductive health and adolescent health at the United Nations Population Fund. “It’s an issue of being accepted in the community.”

Noting that not every community in Malawi encourages sex at ‘initiation camp’, Mweba’s commission reported that girls as young as six were being instructed as to how to please a man and especially in communities in southern Malawi. Older women demonstrate various sexual positions and the girls are encouraged to do ‘sexual cleansing’, also called ‘kusasa fumbi’, rituals that encourage girls to get rid of their inexperience through practice. The girls are advised that without sexual practice, they will get a skin disease.

Memory Banda confirms that a man, nicknamed a hyena or fisi, has unprotected sexual intercourse with the girls as part of this rite of passage. Joyce Mkandawire, the communications advisor at Girls Empowerment Network Malawi, a young women’s rights activist group, explains: “They say they want to see whether the girls have really grown up by having sex with them,” she was quoted as saying, in the study published in the journal AIDS CARE in 2012.

AIDS is a significant problem in Malawi, with over 10% of the population between the ages of 15 and 49 believed to be infected with the disease.

Some girls like Memory Banda or Grace, who is profiled in the CNN story, are rejecting ‘initiation camps’ and working with Malawi’s Girls Empowerment Network, to change the course of their lives.

As Memory explains, she and many other young women in Malawi galvanized their actions around efforts to pass Malawi’s new law making 18 the minimum legal age of marriage. The girls sent text messages to their legal representatives first asking them to support the law and then thanking them for passing it.

Memory Banda opened her TEDWoman talk with a poem written by her friend Eileen Piti, then a 13-year-old girl in her community.

I’ll marry when I want. My mother can’t force me to marry.
My father cannot force me to marry.
My uncle, my aunt, my brother or sister, cannot force me to marry.
No one in the world can force me to marry.
I’ll marry when I want.

Even if you beat me, even if you chase me away, even if you do anything bad to me, I’ll marry when I want.

I’ll marry when I want, but not before I am well educated, and not before I am all grown up.I’ll marry when I want.

Watch more TEDWoman 2015 presentations.