MY FATHER SOLD ME IN EXCHANGE FOR 12 COWS (UNBELIEVABLE)

The act of rape, abduction and forceful marriage of their girls are not news as they are common traditional practices in northern Tanzania.

There is a native Tanzania word called kupura It is a word used by people from the Sukuma tribe to describe the snatching of girls in broad daylight as they walk to school.

Yet in another region known as Shinyanga, the practice of kupura is validated by the oft-recited motto of Sukuma men: alcohol, meat and vagina. "This slogan is in their blood and a way of life," says Revocatus Itendelebanya. "These are the three things they feel entitled to as men."

Itendelebanya, the legal and gender officer for the local NGO, Agape, says this sense of entitlement, in what is a perennially patriarchal society, also explains why passers-by don't intervene when they witness an abduction.

"When a Sukuma man is attracted to a girl he will start asking people where she lives, and what her routine is," explains Itendelebanya.

"Once he finds out these details he might wait for her near the borehole - or whatever he thinks is the best place to get that girl - and then grab her." Kupura is so prevalent in the region that when a girl disappears, her parents will suspect what has happened. But rather than calling the police, they will seek the man out not to rescue their child, but to negotiate the dowry - or bride price - in cattle.

For daughters are sadly seen as a short-term investment for poor, rural households - cash cows that can boost a family's financial position at the expense of a girl's schooling and wellbeing.

Such is the value placed on a girl's head that Itendelebanya says parents will take their daughters to a witch-doctor if they are not attracting any suitors.

Grace was abducted after she refused to marry the older man to whom her father sold her [Marc Ellison/Al Jazeera]

The ensuing samba ritual involves cutting cruciform nicks into the girl's chest and hands with a razor to not only help cleanse her of her bad luck, but to make her more attractive to older men.

And if ever there was a poster child to highlight the pernicious effects of child marriage, it's Grace Masanja.

"Bitterness still fills my heart when I look at them," she says, pointing at the cows grazing at the rear of her family's compound. For Grace they are a daily reminder of how she was treated like cattle, a commodity to be bought and sold.

"But given what I went through, I sometimes wish I had been born a cow," she whispers.

Her father had bartered a dozen cattle for his daughter but, despite daily beatings with sticks and her father's belt, she still refused to marry the older man.

But a deal had been made; a dowry had been paid.

And so it was that Grace was abducted on motorbike by her betrothed early one morning - all with the complicity of her father.

That night, and every day for the next 11 months, she was raped and beaten.

She was only 12.

"That day felt like the end of everything," Grace recalls, glancing again at the cattle.

The Tanzanian government had long made noises about a constitutional review process to address these conflicting laws, but last year's presidential election campaign, in addition to a lack of consensus in community surveys, had served to stall any political momentum on the issue.

Only in July 2016 did the government finally ban child marriage outright - but will it actually make a difference?

Female genital mutilation was outlawed in Tanzania in 1998, and yet a 2010 government survey found that in remote parts of the Mara region, more than 40 percent of girls and women had been cut.

While it is true that Tanzania does not rank among the countries with the highest rates of child marriage, with four out of 10 girls being married before their 18th birthdays, it seems to be a problem that is not going away.

And this national average masks more disturbing regional trends in the vast East African country.

In the Shinyanga region, more than 59 percent of girls like Grace - some of them as young as nine - are forced into child marriages.

The police are not helping matters either as the legal and gender officer says there have been cases of police being paid to ignore some early marriages in villages, to lose crucial evidence, and to even help forge the incriminating birth certificates of child brides.

"Police entertain corruption because they benefit from it," claims Itendelebanya. "And police see NGOs like Agape as preventing the flow of money into their pockets."

But Superintendent Pili Simon Misungwi, who heads the gender desk at the Shinyanga district police station, dismisses any claims of wrongdoing by her staff.

In 2008, the Tanzanian government requested that every police station have such a specialist unit, with trained personnel who could handle cases of gender-based violence and child abuse across the country.

"The police may think the family is cooperating with them, but then when the time comes to testify they tell us the girl is sick, in another village, or even dead."

But were really are we heading to in this world with all this happening may God help us.