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India Has 12 Million Married Children Under Age Ten - The Wire

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Nearly 12 million Indian children were married before the age of 10 years, 84% of them Hindu and 11% Muslim.

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Earlier this year, UNICEF had released a report stating that the number of girls getting married in India had halved. Despite this drop, nearly 1.5 million girls in India get married before they turn 18. Child marriage remains a social evil that India has seemingly had a hard time eradicating.

The legal age of marriage in India is 18 for women and 21 for men. Last year the Supreme Court ruled that sex with an underage wife constituted rape.

Despite all the recent conversation about protecting our young girls following the horrific gangrape and murder of an eight-year-old in Kathua, certain influential politicians and lawmakers in Madhya Pradesh continue to condone and support such the pernicious practice of child marriage.

According to a recent report by the Dainik Bhaskar Post, hundreds of young girls were married off across mass wedding ceremonies in the Rajgarh district of Madhya Pradesh, on the occasion of Akshay Tritiya, an annual springtime festival celebrated by Hindus and Jains.

At one mass wedding ceremony in the Biaora Kalan village, approximately 69 couples, largely within the age bracket of 12-16, got married.

What was even more shocking was the presence of leaders from both the ruling and opposition parties at these mass wedding ceremonies. These leaders reportedly even blessed the couples. The district administration estimates that nearly 1000 minor couples were married off on Wednesday.

Making matter worse, no calls to report and prevent child marriages were made to the helpline number issued by the State women and child development department in the district. Local police and administrators assert that even if they stop a marriage, the parents often take the children away to another place and marry them off. The practice reportedly has the patronage of influential politicians in the district.

The idea of lawmakers or potential legislators supporting such a brazen violation of the law and go against a child's interests is shocking.

Going by the National Family Health Survey-4 statistics, nearly half the women between 20-24 years of age get married before the age of 18 (age of consent) in Rajgarh district. More than 60% of the men between 25 and 29 years of age get married before the age of 21, while nearly 7% of women between 15-19 become mothers or get pregnant.

Even with these statistics in the public domain, the administration seems helpless in dealing with the situation on the ground.

Good news, however, came from Bhopal where the local police prevented three child marriages thanks to the helpline set up by the State government. However faint, this is still a silver lining.

"When a girl is forced to marry as a child, she faces immediate and lifelong consequences. Her odds of finishing school decrease while her odds of being abused by her husband and suffering complications during pregnancy increase. There are also huge societal consequences and a higher risk of intergenerational cycles of poverty," said Anju Malhotra, UNICEF's Principal Gender Advisor, in a statement released by the agency last month. Child marriages have also been a major driver in increasing the frequency of HIV/AIDS, delicate pregnancies, and other such health implications.

Under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act (PCMA), 2006, the marriage between a man above 18 years of age with a woman below 18 years of age, is punishable with imprisonment of two years, a fine of up to Rs 1,00,000, or both. Read more about PCMA here.

If the male is an adult and the bride is a minor; the former can be prosecuted. Parents or guardians encouraging, organising, abetting, forcing, conducting and even attending these wedding ceremonies are liable for prosecution and punishment under both PCMA and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POSCO) Act. However, it is important to note that if the State government goes by the letter of the law, it must prosecute those politicians who attended these mass wedding ceremonies.

Although child marriage is a non-bailable offence, the act recognised it as "voidable", but valid. Despite the enactment of the PCMA, this practice is not automatically void under India's civil laws. Under the current provisions of PCMA, the onus is on the child bride to declare her marriage null and void within two years of attaining majority (20 years of age). If she does not approach the courts and issue her declaration by then, the marriage stands. Considering the social structure within which these minors exist, it is impractical to expect them to go against their parents.

Karnataka, however, addressed this lacuna by inserting a provision in the Act for the state, which declared that every child marriage, whether solemnised before or after the commencement of this new provision of the law, will be treated invalid from the very outset. The apex court lauded the Karnataka government for taking such a step and asked other states to follow suit.

Read more about what Karnataka did here.

Access to better education for young girls, greater impetus on spreading awareness against the debilitating effects of child marriage by government agencies, and extensive work on the ground by local non-profits have worked wonders.

However, a lot more work is required, particularly when it comes to the question of annulment of these marriages. Although states like Karnataka have addressed the problem legally, what they haven't quite manage to achieve is ensure the safety of the girl child in such situations.

Having said that, the example of a "collaborative policing" strategy initiated by Rema Rajeshwari, the former Superintendent of the Police of Mahabubnagar District in Telangana, under the Balyaniki Raksha initiative (started in June 2016) offers a potential model for tackling child marriage.

"Collaborative policing is nothing but taking the help of all the concerned departments. Most of the time, the first distress call is received by the local sub-inspector. Because we receive such information, we have made it a point to train our SHOs to be more sensitive to this issue. However, police alone cannot stop the child marriages. So, what we did is integrate the services," Rema told The News Minute.

In addition to holding a series of meetings and awareness sessions about not just child marriage, but any sort of abuse they suffer, with the various state departments working on the ground, the local police also conducted community outreach programs attended by over 2400 priests, pastors, and maulanas. At these sessions, these local religious figures were told that they would go to jail and suffer other legal consequences for conducting these wedding ceremonies.

Such awareness programs resulted in a significant number of calls coming into the local police stations about potential child marriage ceremonies, and reduced the number of child marriages by nearly 65% over a span of two years, reports The News Minute.

There is hope, but our lawmakers need to take greater responsibility.

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India Has the Highest Number of Child Brides in the World: How Do We Deal With It

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Earlier this year, UNICEF had released a report stating that the number of girls getting married in India had halved. Despite this drop, nearly 1.5 million girls in India get married before they turn 18. Child marriage remains a social evil that India has seemingly had a hard time eradicating.

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RAJASTHAN, India -- Every year, millions of Indian girls are married as children. In some instances the brides are no more than 4 or 5 years old.

Child marriages are illegal in India, but the practice is flourishing.

Rajasthan is the epicenter of India's child marriage. More than half of girls born in the area become child brides before the age of 15.

"The life of a child bride is very sad," said Prem Dabi, who's studying the impact of child marriage on Indian society.

"The moment she gets married, from a physical, mental, emotional and educational perspective, her life becomes very challenging," Dabi added.

Most of India's rural poor live on less than a dollar a day. Marrying off a daughter means one less mouth to feed.
See behind the scenes photos from this story on George Thomas' Facebook page. While you're there, share reaction to his report on India's #childbrides.
Dinesh Shur is a village pastor.

"Girls are seen as a liability and burden," Shur explained. "The girl's family is responsible for the paying [of] the dowry, so the longer they wait to get the girl married off, the more they'll have to pay the future-in-laws."
Secret Weddings
April and May are popular months for marriages in Rajasthan. Villages will hold thousands of ceremonies, the majority of them between minors.

"Every year you'll see the images of parents holding their children, sometimes as young as 4 or 5 years old, in their lap as they get married," Dabi said.

India first introduced laws against child marriage in 1929, and back then the legal age for marriage was set at 12. It was eventually increased to 18 years old in 1978.

To evade the law, families often perform marriages in secret, usually late at night. Outsiders are rarely allowed to attend these ceremonies, let alone film them.

Rajma Patel's parents made an exception, giving CBN News permission to film their son the night before his wedding.

"I am becoming a man tomorrow," Patel laughed on camera.

His parents insist that he's 21. But his friends told CBN News off camera that he's only 10. His young face covered in traditional makeup, he wears a special suit with flashing colored lights.

"I want the youngsters in the village to follow my example," Patel said.

The entire village spends the night before the wedding drinking and dancing.

"Under the influence of alcohol, these dance rituals become sexually charged and often you'll see young boys and girls joining in. It becomes a place to find potential child suitors," pastor Shur said.

Loss of Innocence

CBN News wasn't allowed to film Patel's bride, who is said to be no more than 8 or 9 years old.

"The parents always lie about the child's age," Dabi said. "Families know what they are doing is not right but because of culture and economic reasons, the parents will marry their children off at a young age."

CBN News was allowed to film Veena's wedding. Her wedding took place during the day, which is very uncommon.

"We've been preparing for this wedding for nearly a year," Veena's father Kehra said. "I've invited the entire village to come for this happy occasion."

Veena tried to look her best as she prepared to teeter down the aisle of her house. But she was anything but happy.

In between combing her hair and putting on jewelry, she sobbed uncontrollably. The family tried to console her. When CBN News asked her why she's crying, she refused to talk.

"She has no idea what it means to be a wife, how to take care of a family. But because this has been forced upon her, she has to go along with it. I think she's a little scared," Veena's aunt Jeetha said.

Veena's family insisted she's 18. But she looks 7 or 8.

"I also got married when I was very young. She will adjust," Jeetha said.
No End in Sight
India is only one of many countries where child marriage is thriving. Each year, some 10 million girls are married before they turn 18. The practice is most common in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.

"The girl is married then moves in with her husband's family," Dabi explained. "She's not allowed to go to school to get an education. As soon as she reaches puberty she's expected to have children."

And the ripple effects of these young marriages are devastating. Research shows that girl brides are more likely to

Die during pregnancy and childbirth

Lose her child before it's born

Be infected with HIV

Have three or more births, and

Undergo multiple abortions.

In the village, Veena's soon-to-be husband, Darji Damor, arrived in a bus with his family. Wearing a special crown with flashing lights, he joined a procession of villagers making their way to the bride's home.

His face was partially covered by a multi-colored mask worn until the ceremony is over. His family also insisted he's old enough to legally marry.

"I am ready to be a husband," Darji said.

Weak and exhausted from her emotional preparation, Venna had to be carried down the aisle by her father.

She sobbed through the two-hour ceremony.

"It is heartbreaking to watch," Dinesh said. "These are children, little children getting married."
*Original broadcast June 13, 2012.

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India's Innocent: Secret Weddings of Child Brides

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RAJASTHAN, India -- Every year, millions of Indian girls are married as children. In some instances the brides are no more than 4 or 5 years old. Child marriages are illegal in India, but the practice is flourishing. Rajasthan is the epicenter of India's child marriage.

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MADHURA, India - The well-wishers had all gathered even though neither the teenage bride-to-be nor her mother wanted the girl to go through with the wedding. It took a police raid to stop it, and even then it was nearly too late.

It is hard to state the age of Deepa Kumari, the betrothed girl, with any certainty. A government identification card lists it at 15. Her father, accused of selling Ms. Kumari for about $300 to the groom, a 31-year-old laborer, insists that she is 17. A local constable put the number at 13.

In any case, by dusk on that February evening, a group of plainclothes police officers stormed the village of Madhura in Bihar State. They chased men into fields and detained the bride and groom, already covered in turmeric powder to prepare for the ceremony, for further questioning.

Speaking to reporters at the police station later, Ms. Kumari, with downcast eyes, made her position clear: "I will not marry, sir," she said. "I want to study."

India's child marriage rate is one of the highest in the world, with a long list of social and economic pressures, from poverty to a dearth of education opportunities, propping up the number.

But as awareness has spread about the detriments associated with underage marriages, and as the authorities have responded more diligently, the prevalence has dropped. In some areas, it has done so sharply.

Data released by Unicef on Tuesday found that a girl's risk of marrying before her 18th birthday in South Asia fell by more than a third in the last decade, from nearly 50 percent to about 30 percent, in large part because of progress in India.

Child marriage here is finely threaded with other practices, including the exchange of a dowry from the bride's family to the groom, and sometimes with sex trafficking, making it difficult to tackle any one issue without addressing others. Social workers said there are no easy solutions.

"You cannot wave a magic stick," said Anand Madhab, principle consultant at the Gender Resource Center, an organization that supports women's empowerment. "It's a deep-seated problem."

Bihar, a poor, agrarian state in northern India, has one of the highest rates of underage marriages in the country, according to India's National Family Health Survey. In 2005, 69 percent of surveyed women said they married when they were underage. Ten years later, the number fell to 42.5 percent.

Last year, the Bihari government launched its own campaign to crack down. The chief minister, Nitish Kumar, dispatched social workers to villages and cities across the state, and announced that priests who officiate weddings would be required to sign declarations affirming that both parties are of legal age to marry. The legal age for marriage for Indian women is 18 years old. For men, it is 21.

With the 2006 Prohibition of Child Marriage Prevention Act, Indian lawmakers criminalized child marriage, imposing a jail sentence of up to two years or a fine for offenders.

Still, there is a long way to go. Many child marriages are unreported, and while police have clamped down on the practice in Bihar, more aggressive surveillance could be pushing illegal marriages underground and untraceable.

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"Even Deepa's mother disagreed with the marriage," Anoj Kumar, the head police officer, said at a police station near Madhura. Credit Atul Loke for The New York Times

Though India's numbers are promising, a recent analysis of census data highlighted another disturbing finding. In pockets of India, incidents of child marriage are decreasing in rural areas, but increasing in urban settings.

Researchers involved with the study say it is unclear what is causing that phenomenon. One hypothesis is that an uptick in migration from villages to cities could mean that these weddings have simply been redistributed.

In order to curb the figures, Mr. Madhab said laws must complement locally generated pressure among neighbors to hold each other accountable. He likened the push to stamp out child marriage with another sweeping initiative, the banning of liquor in Bihar in 2016, which worked because it tapped into "fear psychology," he said.

"People consuming the liquor, they are very scared," he said. "They think they are not doing the right thing, they think they are doing wrong."

But unlike consumption of alcohol, child marriage is socially accepted in parts of India, where there is a belief that marrying daughters off at a young age shields them from unwelcome sexual advances and consolidates families' status in a community.

At a police station near Madhura, Anoj Kumar, the head officer, said that this part of Bihar has evolved. Leaning over the criminal complaint lodged against Suresh Chaudhary, the father of Deepa Kumari, he noted that other villagers were against the union.

"Even Deepa's mother disagreed with the marriage," he said. "Suresh said he was marrying her off because of poverty."

A few miles away, in Madhura, Mr. Chaudhary told his side of the story through clenched teeth, balling a pink stole with his fist. "Nobody gave any money," he said. "Society said that we were marrying the girl off by force. Someone from the outside complained."

When the police disrupted wedding preparations, on Feb. 5, Mr. Chaudhary avoided arrest by sprinting into a nearby cornfield and waiting out the night. He remained in hiding for two weeks.

Pressed about his daughter's age, Mr. Chaudhary said he shaved off two years on government documents to give her an advantage in school. As for Ms. Kumari's police statement that he tried to marry her against her will, Mr. Chaudhary posed a rhetorical question: "Now, she is scared of the police. How can she say she wants to get married?"

Amused with the scrum that had formed around Mr. Chaudhary, a man in a white dhoti spoke up in English from the back of the crowd, announcing himself as Kailash Mishra, the landowner who employed the girl's father in his fields.

Mr. Mishra understood that Mr. Chaudhary was technically a man on the run. But he credited him with being a "very good guy, very gentle guy" who happened to be caught doing something virtually everybody else in the village was guilty of.

"The parents are scared," he said. "They are fearing that if a daughter grows up, she'll meet some boys on her own."

There was one part of the police investigation that Mr. Mishra said he could not dispute. As night fell on Madhura, Mr. Chaudhary sounded a halfhearted call for Ms. Kumari to make an appearance. When no one came forward, Mr. Mishra cracked a smile.

"She must be hiding," he said. "She didn't want the marriage. She's happy. What was supposed to happen has not happened."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: India Reduces Marriages Of Children. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Uphill Battle Against Child Marriage Is Being Won in India, for Now

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MADHURA, India - The well-wishers had all gathered even though neither the teenage bride-to-be nor her mother wanted the girl to go through with the wedding. It took a police raid to stop it, and even then it was nearly too late. It is hard to state the age of Deepa Kumari, the betrothed girl, with any certainty.

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The smells and colors-bold yellow turmeric smeared on hands and faces, a strip of red powdered vermillion applied to the hairline-offer the first clues that a wedding is about to happen or has just happened. The girls at this event are often too young to understand marriage, but they're old enough to know what the spices being ceremoniously applied to their bodies signify.

This is what Saumya Khandelwal, a 27-year-old Reuters photographer based in New Delhi, heard from girls who weren't as lucky as she was.

Khandelwal was born in Lucknow, a city in the same state but a world apart from the district of Shravasti. Growing up, she and her friends understood that child marriage happened in India, just not to anyone they knew. But 120 miles away, along the impoverished border of Nepal, girls as young as eight years old are married off by their families.

In 2015, Khandelwal started traveling back and forth from New Delhi to the state of Uttar Pradesh, home to both her and the Taj Mahal, to photograph these young brides. "If I was born in Shravasti, these girls could have been me," Khandelwal says.

Technically, child marriage is illegal in India. A law passed in 1929, the government passed a law banning the practice, and it was updated again in 2006. Today, both women under 18 and men under 21 cannot legally get married. Parents or older spouses can be punished with up to two years in prison for coordinating or allowing arrangements that ignore these restrictions.

Despite a plunge in the rate of child marriages over the past decade, there are more underage brides in India than any other country in the world. More than a quarter of Indian girls are married by the age of 18, according to the organization Girls Not Brides.
(Read about the secret world of child brides in "Too Young to Wed.")
When Khandelwal decided to turn her camera on these girls, she expected tradition and patriarchy to dominate each family's decision to marry off their daughters. What she found was a practice also rooted in poverty, a lack of education, and the volatility of life.

In Shravasti, Khandelwal asked the mother of a young bride who had also been married as child: Why are you subjecting your daughter to the same fate? The mother replied that she'd prefer not to, but there were few other options. Her husband was a day laborer and she and her children gathered and sold firewood. They lived day to day, so it was better to marry off their girls before outside forces intervened. "If we lose our house to floods tomorrow, we won't have anything to give for our daughter's wedding dowry," she said.

Khandelwal found that many families considered their daughters similarly-as liabilities. She met Muskaan (whose name has been changed here for privacy reasons), a vivacious girl with two sisters, and returned again and again to visit her. "Having three girls is seen as three times the expenses and dowry to be paid," says Khandelwal. Some families wait to pull their daughters out of school until after she moves in with her husband, but when Muskaan was married at 14 her father stopped her education immediately. From then on she stayed inside, learning how to cook and take care of the house.

Soon after the wedding, Khandelwal visited Muskaan to find out how she felt. "What she said was particularly disappointing," Khandelwal recalls. "She said, 'What's there to feel about it? This has to happen.' That just tells you how helpless and hopeless these girls are. They don't even know that as women they can have careers."

Many brides find themselves alone after getting married. There's no work to be found in the small villages, so young men often seek their fortune across the giant country. Their wives move in with the in-laws and the newlyweds stay in touch via phone.

"What do you expect a kid who's 15 to understand about marriage or relationships or managing a house?" asks Khandelwal. "They're not educated, and that trickles down to their own kids. They already don't have money, and they're already too young to have kids. It's a vicious cycle. Will they ever be able to come out of this?"

After two and a half years spent photographing the child brides of Shravasti, Khandelwal sees signs of young girls forced into marriage across the country, even in the metropolis of New Delhi. She plans to turn her camera's lens on these communities to show how the practice may be illegal and declining, but in India it's still flourishing on the sidelines.
Saumya Khandelwal is a photographer based in India. You can see more of her work on her website and on Instagram.

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The smells and colors-bold yellow turmeric smeared on hands and faces, a strip of red powdered vermillion applied to the hairline-offer the first clues that a wedding is about to happen or has just happened. The girls at this event are often too young to understand marriage, but they're old enough to know what the spices being ceremoniously applied to their bodies signify.

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Child marriages were prevalent in India. Estimates vary widely between sources as to the extent and scale of child marriages. The International Center for Research on Women- UNICEF publications have estimated India's child marriage rate to be 47% from small sample surveys of 1998, while the United Nations reports it to be 30% in 2005.

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What's the child marriage rate? How big of an issue is child marriage?

27% of girls in India are married before their 18th birthday and 7% are married before the age of 15.

According to UNCIEF, India has the highest absolute number of child brides in the world - 15,509,000.

Are there country-specific drivers of child marriage in this country?

Child marriage is driven by gender inequality and the belief that girls are somehow inferior to boys. In India, child marriage is also driven by:

Pre-marital sex: Marriage is used to preserve the purity of girls as soon as they reach puberty and, sometimes, to ensure that they are not "corrupted" by men of lower castes. There is a high premium placed on virginity, and as such it is sometimes considered more punya (holy) to marry off younger girls. Fathers sometimes lose credibility within communities if their daughters have sex or get married without their consent. Differentiation is made between jaangdaan (when a girl is so young she can sit on her father's lap during a marriage ceremony) and pattaldaan (when she has attained puberty and can sit on a pedestal beside her father).

What has this country committed to?

India has committed to eliminate child, early and forced marriage by 2030 in line with target 5.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals. The government did not provide an update on progress towards this target during its Voluntary National Review at the 2017 High Level Political Forum.

India acceded to the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1992, which sets a minimum age of marriage of 18, and ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1993, which obligates states to ensure free and full consent to marriage.

India is a focus country of the UNICEF-UNFPA Global Programme to Accelerate Action to End Child Marriage, a multi-donor, multi-stakeholder programme working across 12 countries over four years.

India is also a member of the South Asian Initiative to End Violence Against Children (SAIEVAC), which adopted a regional action plan to end child marriage from 2015 - 2018.

Representatives of the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), including India, asserted the Kathmandu Call to Action to End Child Marriage in Asia in 2014. As part of its commitment, India will ensure access to legal remedies for child brides and establish a uniform minimum legal age of marriage of 18.

During its 2017 Universal Periodic Review, India agreed to consider recommendations to improve enforcement of legal provisions against child marriage.

In 2014 the CEDAW Committee raised concerns about high school dropout rates among young girls in India, making them particularly vulnerable to child marriage.

What is the government doing to address this at the national level?

A National Action Plan to prevent child marriages was drafted by the Ministry of Women and Child Development in 2013, but has not yet been finalised. Key components include law enforcement, changing mind-sets and social norms, empowering adolescents, quality education and sharing knowledge.

However due to its decentralised governance structure, in recent years there has been greater movement at the state level in terms of the development of state-level action plans. Whilst some states have taken limited action, Rajasthan launched a Strategy and Action Plan for the Prevention of Child Marriage in March 2017.

The government has also used cash incentives (such as the Dhan Laxmi scheme and the Apni beti apna dhun programme), adolescents' empowerment programmes (Kishori Shakti Yojana) and awareness-raising to encourage behaviour change related to child marriage.

What is the minimum legal framework around marriage?

According to the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 the minimum legal age of marriage in India is 18 years with no exceptions.

There have been a number of recent court cases where petitioners have argued that the provisions of the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 do not apply to Muslims as marriages between Muslims are governed by Muslim Personal Law under the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937. This interpretation of the application of marriage laws has been consistently rejected by the Indian judiciary.

Source

Center for Reproductive Rights, Child Marriage and Personal Laws in South Asia, 2014, (accessed February 2018)

Dasra, Marry me later: preventing child marriage and early pregnancy in India, 2014, (accessed June 2018)

International Center for Research on Women, District Level Study on Child Marriage in India, 2015, (accessed February 2018)

Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, National Family Health Survey 2015-2016, 2017,
(accessed June 2018)

Nirantar Trust, Early and Child Marriage in India, a Landscape Analysis, 2015,
(accessed June 2018)

South Asia Initiative to End Violence Against Children, [website], 2018, (accessed February 2018)

UNICEF-UNFPA, Global Programme to Accelerate Action to End Child Marriage, 2017, (accessed February 2018)

UNICEF India, Child Marriage, [website], 2018, (accessed February 2018)

UN CEDAW, Concluding Observations on the Combined Fourth and Fifth Periodic Reports of India, 2014, p.9, (accessed February 2018)

UN General Assembly, Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review: India, 2017, p.22, (accessed February 2018)

World Bank and International Center for Research on Women, Economic Impacts of Child Marriage: Global Synthesis Report, 2017, (accessed February 2018)

* Child marriage prevalence is the percentage of women 20-24 years old who were married or in union before they were 18 years old (UNICEF State of the World's Children, 2017)

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India - Child Marriage Around The World. Girls Not Brides

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27% of girls in India are married before their 18th birthday and 7% are married before the age of 15. According to UNCIEF, India has the highest absolute number of child brides in the world - 15,509,000. Child marriage is driven by gender inequality and the belief that girls are somehow inferior to boys.

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Child marriage, defined as a formal marriage or informal union before age 18, disproportionately affects girls. Between 2011 and 2020, more than 140 million girls will become child brides, according to United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). In South Asia, nearly half of young women and in sub-Saharan Africa, more than one third of young women are married by their 18th birthday.

The implications for child marriage includes the fact pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death in young women aged 15-19. There is strong evidence highlighting the correlation between early marriage pregnancy and a failure to complete formal education. According to UNICEF's State of the World's Children 2009 report, If a mother is under the age of 18, her infant's risk of dying in its first year of life is 60 per cent greater than that of an infant born to a mother older than 19. Even if the child survives, he or she is more likely to suffer from low birth weight, under nutrition and late physical and cognitive development. Child brides are at risk of violence, abuse and exploitation. Finally, child marriage often results in separation from family and friends and lack of freedom to participate in community activities, which can all have major consequences on girls' mental and physical well-being.

Babatunde Osotimehin, M.D, Executive Director, UNFPA, sums up the ramifications of child marriage when she stated:

"Child marriage is an appalling violation of human rights and robs girls of their education, health and long-term prospects... A girl who is married as a child is one whose potential will not be fulfilled."

Though the practice of child marriage is rooted in tradition and culture, neither culture nor tradition is immutable and there is hope for change. This list presents 16 organisations which directly and indirectly address ending the practice of child marriages and altering conditions which otherwise remain fertile for the practice of child marriages to continue.

_________________________________________________________________________

Breakthrough is a global human rights organisation seeking to make violence and discrimination against women and girls unacceptable. They use the power or arts, media, pop culture, and community mobilisation to inspire people. In their program to end child marriage, they work directly within the communities in the Indian states of Bihar and Jharkhand, which have among the highest rates of child marriage in the country. Breakthrough is a Pixel Project partner.

CARE is an international humanitarian organisation, which focuses on working alongside impoverished women. Part of their mandate includes directly addressing child marriage through targeting the provision of Education for girls. CARE works with families, communities and local organsations to reduce the prevalence and mitigate the harmful impacts of child marriage through educational and behavioral- change programmes.

Organisation Working to Stop Child Marriage #3: Egyptian Foundation for Advancement of the Childhood Condition - Egypt
The Egyptian Foundation for Advancement of the Childhood Condition (EFACC) works to improve legal conditions concerning children's rights and development in Egypt. ICRW summarises a systematic review of child marriage prevention programmes that have documented evaluations and offer analysis of the broader implications for viable solutions.

FAWE is a pan-African NGO working in 32 African countries to empower girls and women through gender-responsive education. FAWE works hand-in-hand with communities, schools, civil society, and ministries to achieve gender equity and equality in education through targeted programmes.
Organisation Working to Stop Child Marriage #5: Forward - UK
An African diaspora network, FORWARD was established in 1983. The International non-governmental organisation is a women's led campaign which seeks to advance and safeguard the reproductive health of African women and girls. FORWARD strives to tackle FGM, child marriage and gender-based violence through educational workshops, advocacy, support programmes and information sharing.

Girls Not Brides is a global partnership of more than 300 non-governmental organisations from over 50 countries committed to ending child marriage.Members are based throughout Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America and work on child marriage in many different ways - by working directly with girls and child brides in their communities or focusing on research and advocacy to bring greater attention to this neglected problem. By coming together in partnership, Girls Not Brides members are raising their voices to call for action on child marriage locally, nationally and all over the world.
Organisation Working to Stop Child Marriage #8 : Humanium: Help the Children - Global
Girls UP has dedicated advocacy and organisational efforts to ensure child marriage legislation is a priority in the US Foreign Policy Engagements. In March of 2013, their efforts were rewarded with a victory for women and girls living in the United States and abroad as The US House of Representatives passed the long-awaited child marriage legislation as part of a broader Violence Against Women Act.
Organisation Working to Stop Child Marriage #9:ICRW - USA
Humanium is an international child sponsorship NGO dedicated to stopping violations of children's rights throughout the world. They provide education on children's rights and support in many countries around the world regarding child and forced marriage.

International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) is a leader among organisations advocating for the United States to become more involved in curbing child marriage. ICRW is working with the United States Congress and the administration to raise the profile of this issue and bring more national and international support to end this harmful traditional practice.

The Saarthi Trust was set up by Kriti Bharti an award-winning anti-child-marriage activist and women and children's rights campaigner who has been working to help children in Rajasthan for over five years. The Trust was set up in 2012 to address the child marriage crisis facing India. Kriti provides programmes, psychological support and education to women and children.

Save the Children works around the world to develop programmes to protect children and prevent child marriage along with other forms of risk for child abuse, trafficking, and exploitation.

The Seyaj organisation for childhood protection is a non-profit volunteering and independent non-government organisation specialising in defending child rights through monitoring, documentation and providing judicial advocacy. psychological support and education for child victims of crimes and violations including child marriage.

The Coexist Initiative was founded in 2002 and officially registered in 2005 as a non -profit network for men and boys organizations that work in the areas of sexual and gender - based violence (SGBV) and HIV prevention in Kenya. The Coexist Initiative is unique insofar as it targets males in order to effect change. They advocate against child and forced marriage, against female genital mutilation, and other rights and societal benefits.

The Knowledge Hub (KHub) is a web-portal exclusively focused on the issue of child marriage, designed to cater to growing need for evidence-based approaches on prevention of child marriages in India and neighboring countries. It provides an easy access to authentic resources for strengthening the policy and programmatic environment on the issue at the state and national levels as well as their implementation at grassroots. KHub is the process of GEPP - Getting Evidence into Policy and Practice. The concept of KHub is not only to build a repository of existing knowledge on current status but also to create new knowledge/ evidences that will demystify the immense base of strategic and technical knowledge that exists already.

VASAVYA MAHILA MANDALI (VMM) was established forty years ago with Gandhian ideology as a secular nonprofit voluntary organisation working in the rural as well as urban areas of Andhra Pradesh. VMM works to promote comprehensive social, economic and political development for women, children and youth in vulnerable situations including Child marriages, thereby empowering communities in A.P to improve their quality of life, and build a better civil society in India.

World Vision works towards the provision of global education for children who are at risk for exploitation, early marriage, and lower income-earning potential. In Bangladesh, they address barriers to education and work with communities and local governments to improve the quality of education children receive. The marriage later/studies first programme works with families to educate them regarding the impact of child marriage.

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16 Organisations Working to Stop Child Marriage

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Child marriage, defined as a formal marriage or informal union before age 18, disproportionately affects girls. Between 2011 and 2020, more than 140 million girls will become child brides, according to United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). In South Asia, nearly half of young women and in sub-Saharan Africa, more than one third of young women are married by their 18th birthday.

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Girls Not Brides members are a diverse network of civil society organisations working to end child marriage around the world. Their experience, unique understanding and longstanding connections with girls and communities are the driving force of our movement. You can support our cause by donating directly to them.

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Girls Not Brides is a global partnership working collectively to ending child marriage so that girls can fulfil their potential.

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Child marriage is a marriage or similar union, formal or informal, between a child and an adult or another child under a certain age, typically age eighteen. The vast majority of child marriages are between a girl and a man, and are rooted in gender inequality.

Child marriage violates the rights of children and has widespread and long-term consequences for child brides and child grooms. For girls, in addition to mental health issues and a lack of access to education and career opportunities, this includes adverse health effects as a result of early pregnancy (including teenage pregnancy) and childbirth. There is little research on boys in child marriages, but effects on boys include being ill-prepared for certain responsibilities such as providing for the family, early fatherhood, and a lack of access to education and career opportunities. Child marriage is related to child betrothal, and it includes civil cohabitation and court-approved early marriages after teenage pregnancy. Causes of child marriages include poverty, bride price, dowry, cultural traditions, religious and social pressures, regional customs, fear of the child remaining unmarried into adulthood, illiteracy, and perceived inability of women to work for money. Research indicates that comprehensive sex education can help to prevent child marriage.

Child marriages have been common throughout history and continue to be fairly widespread, particularly in developing countries such as parts of Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, West Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. However, even in developed countries such as the United States legal exceptions mean that 17 US states have no minimum age requirement. The incidence of child marriage has been falling in most parts of the world. 2018 data from UNICEF showed that about 21 percent of young women worldwide (aged 20 to 24) were married as children; this is a 25 percent decrease from 10 years previously. The countries with the highest observed rates of child marriages below the age of 18 were Niger, Chad, Mali, Bangladesh, Guinea, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, and Nepal with rates above 50%. Niger, Chad, Bangladesh, Mali and Ethiopia were the countries with child marriage rates greater than 20% below the age of 15, according to 2003-2009 surveys. Globally, an estimated 12 million girls annually are being married under the age of 18.

Before the industrial revolution, in many parts of the world, including India, China and Eastern Europe, women tended to marry immediately after reaching puberty, in their mid-teens. Societies where most of the population lived in small agricultural communities were characterized by these marriage practices well into the 19th century. Men tended to marry later in societies where a married couple was expected to establish a household of their own. That usually meant that men remained unmarried until they accumulated sufficient wealth to support a new home, and were married in their mature age to adolescent girls, who contributed a dowry to the family finances.

In ancient and medieval societies, it was common for girls to be betrothed at or even before the age of puberty. According to M.A. Friedman, "arranging and contracting the marriage of a young girl were the undisputed prerogatives of her father in ancient Israel." Most girls were married before the age of 15, often at the start of their puberty. In the Middle Ages the age at marriage seems to have been around puberty throughout the Jewish world.

In Ancient Greece, early marriage and motherhood for girls existed. Even boys were expected to marry in their teens. Early marriages and teenage motherhood were typical. In Ancient Rome, females could marry above the age of 12 and males could marry above the age of 14. In the Middle Ages, under English civil laws that were derived from Roman laws, marriages before the age of 16 existed. In Imperial China, child marriage was the norm.

Most of the religions known in history have established a minimum age for marriage in one way or another. Christian canon law forbade the marriage of a girl before the onset the age of puberty, and the Hindu holy book, the Vedas, after the age of puberty. In the Vedas marriage is shown to be between two adult persons after the Brahmacharya stage. The Vedas, specifically the Rigveda and Atharvaveda, have verses that clearly indicate that during the Vedic Period, girls married well after attaining puberty and were of a mature age. The early Dharmaśāstra (Dharmasutras) also state that girls should be married after they have attained puberty while some texts extend the marriageable age to before puberty. In the Manusmriti, which was not implemented as law, a father is considered to have wronged his daughter if he fails to marry her before puberty and if the girl is not married in less than three years after reaching puberty, she can search for the husband herself.

Jewish scholars and rabbis strongly discouraged marriages before the onset of puberty, but at the same time, in exceptional cases, girls ages 3 through 12 (the legal age of consent according to halakha) might be given in marriage by her father. By Judaism, the minimal girl age, for marriage, was 12 years and one day, "na'arah", as mentioned in the ancient Talmud Mishnah books (compiled between 536 BCE - 70 CE, redacted in the 3rd century CE), Order Nashim Masechet Kiddushin 41 a & b.

According to halakha girls should not marry until they are 12 years and six months old, "bogeret". Although Moses Maimonides mentions in the Talmud Mishneh Torah (compiled between 1170 and 1180 CE) that in exceptional cases girls ages three through 12 might be given in marriage by her father, he also clarifies in verse 3:19 of the same chapter that: "Although a father has the option of consecrating his daughter to anyone he desires while she is a minor or while she is a maiden, it is not proper for him to act in this manner".

According to the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia, apocryphal accounts that, at the time of her betrothal to Joseph, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was 12-14 years old.

Historically within the Catholic Church, prior to the 1917 Code of Canon Law, the minimum age for a dissoluble betrothal (sponsalia de futuro) was seven years in the contractees. The minimum age for a valid marriage was puberty, or nominally 14 for males and 12 for females. The 1917 Code of Canon Law raised the minimum age for a valid marriage at 16 for males and 14 for females. The 1983 Code of Canon Law maintained the minimum age for a valid marriage at 16 for males and 14 for females.

There is no minimum marriage age defined in traditional Islamic law, and the legal discussion of this topic centered primarily on women's physical maturity. Classical Sunni jurisprudence allows a father to contract a marriage for his underaged girl. Appropriate age for consummating the marriage, which could occur several years after signing the marriage contract, was to be determined by the bride, groom and the bride's guardian, since medieval jurists held that the age of fitness for intercourse was too variable for legislation. This was based in part on the precedent set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad, as described in the hadith collections considered to be authentic by Muslims. According to these sources, Muhammad married Aisha, his third wife, when she was about six, and consummated the marriage when she was about nine. Some modern Muslim authors and Islamic scholars, such as Ali Gomaa, who served as the Grand Mufti of Egypt, doubt the traditionally accepted narrative and believe based on other evidence that Aisha was in her late teens at the time of her marriage. As a general rule, intercourse was prohibited for girls "not able to undergo it", on the grounds of potential physical harm. Disputes regarding physical maturity between the involved parties were to be resolved by a judge, potentially after examination by a female expert witness. The 1917 codification of Islamic family law in the Ottoman empire distinguished between the age of competence for marriage, which was set at 18 for boys and 17 for girls, and the minimum age for marriage, set at 12 for boys and nine for girls. Marriage below the age of competence was permissible only if proof of sexual maturity was accepted in court, while marriage under the minimum age was forbidden. During the 20th century, sharia-based legislation in most countries in the Middle East followed the Ottoman precedent in defining the age of competence, while raising the minimum age to 15 or 16 for boys and 13-16 for girls. In 2019 Saudi Arabia raised the age of marriage to 18.

Despite the fact that by the beginning of the 21st century, the laws of most countries established the general minimum age for marriage at 18 years, in many countries (and not only in developing or religious ones) there are exceptions that allow marriage before this age with the consent of the parents and/or by court decision. In some countries, a religious marriage is still recognized by the state authorities along with a secular marriage or even instead of it, in others, a registered civil marriage is mandatory.

Child marriage has lasting consequences on girls, from their health (mental and physical), education and social development perspectives. These consequences last well beyond adolescence. One of the most common causes of death for girls aged 15 to 19 in developing countries was pregnancy and childbirth. In Niger, which is estimated as having the highest rate of child marriage in the world, about 3 in 4 girls marry before their 18th birthday.

Boys are sometimes married as children; UNICEF states that "girls [are] disproportionately affected by the practice. Globally, the prevalence of child marriage among boys is just one sixth that among girls." Research on the effects of child marriage on underage boys is scant, which researchers state is likely because child marriage involving boys is less common and girls being at risk for adverse health effects as a result of early pregnancy and childbirth. The effects of child marriage on boys include being ill-prepared for certain responsibilities such as providing for the family, early fatherhood, and a lack of access to education and career opportunities. As of September 2014, 156 million living men were married as underage boys.

In its first in-depth analysis of child grooms, UNICEF revealed that an estimated 115 million boys and men around the world were married as children. Of these, 1 in 5 children, or 23 million, were married before the age of 15. According to the data, the Central African Republic has the highest prevalence of child marriage among males (28 per cent), followed by Nicaragua (19 per cent) and Madagascar (13 per cent). The estimates bring the total number of child brides and child grooms to 765 million. Girls remain disproportionately affected, with 1 in 5 young women aged 20 to 24 years old married before their 18th birthday, compared to 1 in 30 young men.

According to UNFPA, factors that promote and reinforce child marriage include poverty and economic survival strategies; gender inequality; sealing land or property deals or settling disputes; control over sexuality and protecting family honour; tradition and culture; and insecurity, particularly during war, famine or epidemics. Other factors include family ties in which marriage is a means of consolidating powerful relations between families.

A bride price is the amount paid by the groom to the parents of a bride for them to consent to him marrying their daughter. In some countries, the younger the bride, the higher the price she may fetch. This practice creates an economic incentive where girls are sought and married early by her family to the highest bidder. Child marriages of girls is a way out of desperate economic conditions, or simply a source of income to the parents. Bride price is another cause of child marriage and child trafficking.

Bride kidnapping, also known as bridenapping, marriage by abduction or marriage by capture, is a practice in which a male abducts the female he wishes to marry. Bride kidnapping has been practiced around the world and throughout history. It continues to occur in countries in Central Asia, the Caucasus region, and parts of Africa, and among peoples as diverse as the Hmong in Southeast Asia, the Tzeltal in Mexico, and the Romani in Europe.

In most nations, bride kidnapping is considered a crime rather than a valid form of marriage. Some types of it may also be seen as falling along the continuum between forced marriage and arranged marriage. However, even when the practice is against the law, judicial enforcement remains lax in some areas. Bride kidnapping occurs in various parts of the world, but it is most common in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Bride kidnapping is often (but not always) a form of child marriage. It may be connected to the practice of bride price, and the inability or unwillingness to pay it.

Social upheavals such as wars, major military campaigns, forced religious conversion, taking natives as prisoners of war and converting them into slaves, arrest and forced migrations of people often made a suitable groom a rare commodity. Bride's families would seek out any available bachelors and marry them to their daughters, before events beyond their control moved the boy away. Persecution and displacement of Roma and Jewish people in Europe, colonial campaigns to get slaves from various ethnic groups in West Africa across the Atlantic for plantations, Islamic campaigns to get Hindu slaves from India across Afghanistan's Hindu Kush as property and for work, were some of the historical events that increased the practice of child marriage before the 19th century.

Among Sephardi Jewish communities, child marriages became frequent from the 10th to 13th centuries, especially in Muslim Spain. This practice intensified after the Jewish community was expelled from Spain, and resettled in the Ottoman Empire. Child marriages among the Eastern Sephardic Jews continued through the 18th century in Islamic majority regions.

A sense of social insecurity has been a cause of child marriages across the world. For example, in Nepal, parents fear likely social stigma if adult daughters (past 18 years) stay at home. Other fear of crime such as rape, which not only would be traumatic but may lead to less acceptance of the girl if she becomes victim of a crime. For example, girls may not be seen as eligible for marriage if they are not virgins. In other cultures, the fear is that an unmarried girl may engage in illicit relationships, or elope causing a permanent social blemish to her siblings, or that the impoverished family may be unable to find bachelors for grown-up girls in their economic social group. Such fears and social pressures have been proposed as causes that lead to child marriages. Insofar as child marriage is a social norm in practicing communities, the elimination of child marriage must come through a changing of those social norms. The mindset of the communities, and what is believed to be the proper outcome for a child bride, must be shifted to bring about a change in the prevalence of child marriage.

Extreme poverty may make daughters an economic burden on the family, which may be relieved by their early marriage, to the benefit of the family as well as the girl herself. Poor parents may have few alternatives they can afford for the girls in the family; they often view marriage as a means to ensure their daughter's financial security and to reduce the economic burden of a growing adult on the family. Child marriage can also be seen as means of ensuring a girl's economic security, particularly if she lacks family members to provide for her. In reviews of Jewish community history, scholars claim poverty, shortage of grooms, uncertain social and economic conditions were a cause for frequent child marriages.

An additional factor causing child marriage is the parental belief that early marriage offers protection. Parents feel that marriage provides their daughter with a sense of protection from sexual promiscuity and safe from sexually transmitted infections. However, in reality, young girls tend to marry older men, placing them at an increased risk of contracting a sexually transmitted infection.

Protection through marriage may play a specific role in conflict settings. Families may have their young daughters marry members of an armed group or military in hopes that she will be better protected. Girls may also be taken by armed groups and forced into marriages.

Although the general marriageable age is 18 in the majority of countries, most jurisdictions allow for exceptions for underage youth with parental and/or judicial consent. Such laws are neither limited to developing countries, nor to state religion. In some countries a religious marriage by itself has legal validity, while in others it does not, as civil marriage is obligatory. For Catholics incorporated into the Latin Church, the 1983 Code of Canon Law sets the minimum age for a valid marriage at 16 for males and 14 for females. In 2015, Spain raised its minimum marriageable age to 18 (16 with court consent) from the previous 14. In Mexico, marriage under 18 is allowed with parental consent, from age 14 for girls and age 16 for boys. In Ukraine, in 2012, the Family Code was amended to equalize the marriageable age for girls and boys to 18, with courts being allowed to grant permission to marry from age 16 years if it is established that the marriage is in the best interest of the youth.

Many states in the US permit child marriages, with court's permission. Since 2015, the minimum marriageable age throughout Canada is 16. In Canada the age of majority is set by province/territory at 18 or 19, so minors under this age have additional restrictions (i.e. parental and court consent). Under the Criminal Code, Art. 293.2 Marriage under age of 16 years reads: "Everyone who celebrates, aids or participates in a marriage rite or ceremony knowing that one of the persons being married is under the age of 16 years is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years." The Civil Marriage Act also states: "2.2 No person who is under the age of 16 years may contract marriage." In the UK, marriage is allowed for 16-17 years old with parental consent in England and Wales as well as in Northern Ireland, and even without parental consent in Scotland. However, a marriage of a person under 16 is void under the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973. The United Nations Population Fund stated the following:

In 2010, 158 countries reported that 18 years was the minimum legal age for marriage for women without parental consent or approval by a pertinent authority. However, in 146 countries, state or customary law allows girls younger than 18 to marry with the consent of parents or other authorities; in 52 countries, girls under age 15 can marry with parental consent. In contrast, 18 is the legal age for marriage without consent among males in 180 countries. Additionally, in 105 countries, boys can marry with the consent of a parent or a pertinent authority, and in 23 countries, boys under age 15 can marry with parental consent.

Lower legally allowed marriage age does not necessarily cause high rates of child marriages. However, there is a correlation between restrictions placed by laws and the average age of first marriage. In the United States, per 1960 Census data, 3.5% of girls married before the age of 16, while an additional 11.9% married between 16 and 18. States with lower marriage age limits saw higher percentages of child marriages. This correlation between higher age of marriage in civil law and observed frequency of child marriages breaks down in countries with Islam as the state religion. In Islamic nations, many countries do not allow child marriage of girls under their civil code of laws. But, the state recognized Sharia religious laws and courts in all these nations have the power to override the civil code, and often do. UNICEF reports that the top eight nations in the world with highest observed child marriage rates are Niger (75%), Chad (72%), Mali (71%), Bangladesh (64%), Guinea (63%), Central African Republic (61%), Mozambique (56%), and Nepal (51%).

In Rabbinic Judaism, males cannot consent to marriage until they reach the age of 13 years and a day and have undergone puberty. They are considered minors until the age of twenty. The same rules apply to females, except their age is 12 years and a day. After twenty, males are not considered adults if they show signs of impotence. If females show no signs of puberty and males show no signs of puberty or do show impotence, they automatically become adults by age 35 and can marry.

A large age gap between spouses, in either direction, is advised against as unwise. A younger woman marrying a significantly older man however is especially problematic: marrying one's young daughter to an old man was declared as reprehensible as forcing her into prostitution.

A ketannah (literally meaning "little [one]") was any girl between the age of 3 years and that of 12 years plus one day; she was subject to her father's authority, and he could arrange a marriage for her without her agreement. However, after reaching the age of maturity, she would have to agree to the marriage to be considered as married.

The minimum ages of consent for marriage in the Catholic Church are 14 for girls and 16 for boys. Being underage constitutes a diriment impediment. That is, a marriage involving an underage bride or groom is canonically invalid. A Conference of Bishops may adopt a higher age for marriage, but in that case, the higher age only creates a prohibitive impediment, that is, a marriage involving a bride or groom above the Church's minimum age but below that set by the Conference is valid but illicit. Permission to marry against a civil authority's directive requires the permission of the Ordinary, which, in the case of sensible and equal laws regarding marriage age, is not usually granted. The permission by the Ordinary is also required in case of a marriage of a minor when their parents are unaware of his marriage or if their parents reasonably oppose the marriage.

In classical Islamic law, suitability for marital relations is conditional on physical maturity ( bulugh) and mental maturity ( rushd). Classical jurists did not stipulate a minimum marriageable age because they did not believe that maturity is reached by everyone at a specific age. Büchler and Schlater observe that "marriageable age according to classical Islamic law coincides with the occurrence of puberty. The notion of puberty refers to signs of physical maturity such as the emission of semen or the onset of menstruation". Traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence ( madhaahib) define the age of full legal capacity to enter marriage as follows:

According to Büchler and Schlater, while marriageable age is not the same as legal majority under civil law, these age limits may correspond.

The 1917 codification of Islamic family law in the Ottoman empire distinguished between the age of competence for marriage, which was set at 18 for boys and 17 for girls, and the minimum age for marriage, which followed the traditional Hanafi ages of legal majority of 12 for boys and 9 for girls. Marriage below the age of competence was permissible only if proof of sexual maturity was accepted in court, while marriage under the minimum age was forbidden. During the 20th century, most countries in the Middle East followed the Ottoman precedent in defining the age of competence, while raising the minimum age to 15 or 16 for boys and 13-16 for girls. Marriage below the age of competence is subject to approval by a judge and the legal guardian of the adolescent. Egypt diverged from this pattern by setting the age limits of 18 for boys and 16 for girls, without a distinction between competence for marriage and minimum age. In 2020, Saudi Arabia officially banned all marriages under the age of 18. The push to ban child marriage was initially opposed by senior clergy, who argued that a woman reaches adulthood at puberty. However, by 2019 the Saudi Shura Council had outlawed marriages under the age of 15, and required court approval for those under 18.

African countries have enacted marriageable age laws to limit marriage to a minimum age of 16 to 18, depending on jurisdiction. In Ethiopia, Chad and Niger, the legal marriage age is 15, but local customs and religious courts have the power to allow marriages below 12 years of age. Child marriages of girls in West Africa and Northeast Africa are widespread. Additionally, poverty, religion, tradition, and conflict make the rate of child marriage in Sub-Saharan Africa very high in some regions.

The various reports indicate that in many Sub-Saharan countries, there is a high incidence of marriage among girls younger than 15. Many governments have tended to overlook the particular problems resulting from child marriage, including obstetric fistulae, premature births, stillbirth, sexually transmitted diseases (including cervical cancer), and malaria.

As of 2006, 15-20% of school dropouts in Nigeria were the result of child marriage. In 2013, Nigeria attempted to change Section 29, subsection 4 of its laws and thereby prohibit child marriages. Christianity and Islam are each practiced by roughly half of its population, and the country continues with personal laws from its British colonial era laws, where child marriages are forbidden for its Christians and allowed for its Muslims. Child marriage is a divisive topic in Nigeria and widely practiced. In northern states, predominantly Muslim, over 50% of the girls marry before the age of 15.

In 2016, during a feast ending the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the Gambian President Yahya Jammeh announced that child and forced marriages were banned.

In Morocco, child marriage is a common practice. Over 41,000 marriages every year involve child brides. Before 2003, child marriages did not require a court or state's approval. In 2003, Morocco passed the family law ( Moudawana) that raised minimum age of marriage for girls from 14 to 18, with the exception that underage girls may marry with the permission of the government recognized official/court and girl's guardian. Over the 10 years preceding 2008, requests for child marriages have been predominantly approved by Morocco's Ministry for Social Development, and have increased (c. 29% of all marriages). Some child marriages in Morocco are a result of Article 475 of the Moroccan penal code, a law that allows rapists to avoid punishment if they marry their underage victims. Article 475 was amended in January 2014 after much campaigning, and rapists can legally no longer avoid sentencing by marrying their victim.

In South Africa the law provides for respecting the marriage practices of traditional marriages, whereby a person might be married as young as 12 for females and 14 for males. Early marriage is cited as "a barrier to continuing education for girls (and boys)". This includes absuma ( arranged marriages set up between cousins at birth in local Islamic ethnic group), bride kidnapping and elopement decided on by the children.

In 2016, the Tanzanian High Court - in a case filed by the Msichana Initiative, a lobbying group that advocates for girls' right to education - ruled in favor of protecting girls from the harms of early marriage. It is now illegal for anyone younger than 18 to marry in Tanzania.

In 2019, Mozambique's national assembly passed a law prohibiting child marriage. This law came after national movements condemning Mozambique's high rate of child marriage with 50% of girls marrying under the age of 18.

A 2015 Human Rights Watch report stated that in Zimbabwe, one-third of women aged between 20 and 49 years old had married before reaching the age of 18. In January 2016, two women who had been married as children brought a court case requesting a change in the legal age of marriage to the Constitutional Court, with the result that the court declared that 18 is to be the minimum age for a legal marriage for both men and women (previously the legal age had been 16 for women and 18 for men). The law took effect immediately, and was hailed by a number of human rights, women's rights, medical and legal groups as a landmark ruling for the country.

UNICEF stated in 2018 that although the number of child marriages has declined on a worldwide scale, the problem remains most severe in Africa, despite the fact that Ethiopia cut child marriage rates by a third.

Child marriage is common in Latin America and the Caribbean island nations. About 29% of girls are married before age 18. Dominican Republic, Honduras, Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti and Ecuador report some of the highest rates in the Americas, while Bolivia and Guyana have shown the sharpest decline in child marriage rates as of 2012. Brazil is ranked fourth in the world in terms of absolute numbers of girls married or cohabitating by age fifteen.

In Guatemala, early marriage is most common among indigenous Mayan communities.[citation needed ] In southeastern Colombia, historically the indigenous Nasa sometimes married at early ages to dissuade colonizers from coercively taking girls.

Since 2015, the minimum marriageable age throughout Canada is 16. In Canada the age of majority is set by province/territory at 18 or 19, so minors under this age have additional restrictions (i.e. parental and court consent). Under the Criminal Code, Art. 293.2 Marriage under age of 16 years reads: "Everyone who celebrates, aids or participates in a marriage rite or ceremony knowing that one of the persons being married is under the age of 16 years is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years." The Civil Marriage Act also states: "2.2 No person who is under the age of 16 years may contract marriage."

Child marriage, as defined by UNICEF, is observed in the United States. The UNICEF definition of child marriage includes couples who are formally married, or who live together as a sexually active couple in an informal union, with at least one member - usually the girl - being less than 18 years old. The latter practice is more common in the United States, and it is officially called cohabitation. According to a 2010 report by National Center for Health Statistics, an agency of the government of United States, 2.1% of all girls in the 15-17 age group were in a child marriage. In the age group of 15-19, 7.6% of all girls in the United States were formally married or in an informal union. The child marriage rates were higher for certain ethnic groups and states. In Hispanic groups, for example, 6.6% of all girls in the 15-17 age group were formally married or in an informal union, and 13% of the 15-19 age group were. Over 350,000 babies are born to teenage mothers every year in the United States, and over 50,000 of these are second babies to teen mothers.

Laws regarding child marriage vary in the different states of the United States. Generally, children 16 and over may marry with parental consent, with the age of 18 being the minimum in all but two states to marry without parental consent. However all states but Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania have exceptions for child marriage within their laws, and although those under 16 generally require a court order in addition to parental consent, when those exceptions are taken into account, 17 states have no minimum age requirement.

Between 2000 and 2015 there were at least 207,468 child marriages in the United States of which over 1,000 marriage licences were for children under 15, some as young as ten years old.

Until 2008 the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints practiced child marriage through the concept of " spiritual marriage" as soon as girls were ready to bear children, as part of its polygamy practice, but laws have raised the age of legal marriage in response to criticism of the practice.[failed verification ] In 2008 the Church changed its policy in the United States to no longer marry individuals younger than the local legal age. In 2007 church leader Warren Jeffs was convicted of being an accomplice to statutory rape of a minor due to arranging a marriage between a 14-year-old girl and a 19-year-old man. In March 2008 officials of the state of Texas believed that children at the Yearning For Zion Ranch were being married to adults and were being abused. The state of Texas removed all 468 children from the ranch and placed them into temporary state custody. After the Austin's 3rd Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of Texas ruled that Texas acted improperly in removing them from the YFZ Ranch, the children were returned to their parents or relatives.

Musician Jerry Lee Lewis's third wife, Myra Gale Brown, was Lewis's first cousin once removed and was only 13 years old when they married.

The vast majority of girls who are wed before the age of 18, face detrimental effects. Many are separated and removed from family and friends leading to why 50% drop out of school. The chances of living in poverty are doubled in early life marriages, and tripled for the likelihood of domestic abuse to occur than married adults.

Early age pregnancy is a common reason for child marriages. Abortion laws within the actual law as well as family values and religion play a large part in choosing to marry a child off rather than allow them to get in abortion. Yet, girls aged between 15-19 are twice as likely to die in childbirth than women in their twenties, their children are much more likely to face fatal health problems as well as newborns.

More than half of all child marriages occur in the South Asian countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. There was a decrease in the rates of child marriage across South Asia from 1991 to 2007, but the decrease was observed among young adolescent girls and not girls in their late teens. Some scholars believe this age-specific reduction was linked to girls increasingly attending school until about age 15 and then marrying.

A 2013 report claims 53% of all married women in Afghanistan were married before age 18, and 21% of all were married before age 15. Afghanistan's official minimum age of marriage for girls is 15 with her father's permission. In all 34 provinces of Afghanistan, the customary practice of is another reason for child marriages; this custom involves village elders, jirga, settling disputes between families or unpaid debts or ruling punishment for a crime by forcing the guilty family to give their 5- to 12-year-old girls as a wife. Sometimes a girl is forced into child marriage for a crime her uncle or distant relative is alleged to have committed. Andrew Bushell claims rate of marriage of 8- to 13-year-old girls exceeding 50% in Afghan refugee camps along the Pakistan border.

Over half of Yemeni girls are married before 18, some by the age eight. Yemen government's Sharia Legislative Committee has blocked attempts to raise marriage age to either 15 or 18, on grounds that any law setting minimum age for girls is un-Islamic. Yemeni Muslim activists argue that some girls are ready for marriage at age 9. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), in 1999 the minimum marriage age 15 for women was abolished; the onset of puberty, interpreted by conservatives to be at age nine, was set as a requirement for consummation of marriage. In practice "Yemeni law allows girls of any age to wed, but it forbids sex with them until the indefinite time they're 'suitable for sexual intercourse'." As with Africa, the marriage incidence data for Yemen in HRW report is from surveys between 1990 and 2000. Current data is difficult to obtain because of regional violence.

In April 2008, Nujood Ali, a 10-year-old girl, successfully obtained a divorce after being raped under these conditions. Her case prompted calls to raise the legal age for marriage to 18. Later in 2008, the Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood proposed to define the minimum age for marriage at 18 years. The law was passed in April 2009, with the age voted for as 17. But the law was dropped the next day following maneuvers by opposing parliamentarians. Negotiations to pass the legislation continue. Meanwhile, Yemenis inspired by Nujood's efforts continue to push for change, with Nujood involved in at least one rally. In September 2013, an 8-year-old girl died of internal bleeding and uterine rupture on her wedding night after marrying a 40-year-old man.

The widespread prevalence of child marriage in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been documented by human rights groups. Saudi clerics have justified the marriage of girls as young as 9, with sanction from the judiciary. No laws define a minimum age of consent in Saudi Arabia, though drafts for possible laws have been created since 2011. Members of the Saudi Shoura Council in 2019 approved fresh regulations for minor marriages that will outlaw the marrying of 15-year-olds and force the need for court approval for those under 18. Chairman of the Human Rights Committee at the Shoura Council, Dr. Hadi Al-Yami, said that introduced controls were based on in-depth studies presented to the body. He pointed out that the regulation, vetted by the Islamic Affairs Committee at the Shoura Council, has raised the age of marriage to 18 and prohibited it for those under 15. Saudi Arabia has officially updated the law banning all marriages under the age of 18.

Child marriage was also found to be prevalent among Syrian and Palestinian Syrian refugees in Lebanon, in addition to other forms of sexual and gender-based violence. Marriage was seen as a potential way to protect family honor and protect a girl from rape given how common rape was during the conflict. Incidents of child marriages increased in Syria and among Syrian refugees over the course of the conflict. The proportion of Syrian refugee girls living in Jordan who were married increased from 13% in 2011 to 32% in 2014. Journalists Magnus Wennman and Carina Bergfeldt documented the practice, and some of its results.

There has been an increase in underage marriage which has been attributed to a rise in social networking sites like Facebook. It has been reported that in areas like Gunung Kidul, Yogyakarta, couples become acquainted through Facebook and continuing their relationships until girls became pregnant. Under Indonesian law underage marriage is prosecuted as sexual abuse, though unregistered marriages between young girls and older men are common in rural areas. In one case that caused a nation-wide outcry, a wealthy Muslim cleric married a 12-year-old girl. He was prosecuted for sexually abusing a minor and sentenced to 4 years in jail.

In Malaysia, the public was shocked when they learned that a 41-year-old Malaysian wedded an 11-year-old girl in Golok, a border town in southern Thailand. The man, who already has two wives and six children, is said to be the imam of a surau at a village in Gua Musang, Kelantan. His second wife posted photographs online of the man and the young girl and their alleged solemnisation, causing public outrage. The parents of the 11-year-old girl defended their decision to allow their daughter's marriage to the 41-year-old man.

In response to this incident, Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Wan Azizah Wan Ismail said the marriage between a 41-year-old man and his 11-year-old child bride remains valid under Islam. She also said in a press statement that 'The Malaysian government "unequivocally" opposes child marriages and is already taking steps to raise the minimum age of marriage to 18'. The child marriage in Gua Musang is still under active investigation by multiple agencies.

Following this controversy, Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Datuk Mujahid Yusof Rawa proposed a blanket ban on marriages involving under-aged children. In response, PAS Vice President Datuk Mohd Amar Nik Abdullah said that imposing a blanket ban on child marriage contravenes Islamic religious teachings, therefore, the blanket ban could not be accepted. "It is not wrong to marry young, from the religious perspective," he said on the sidelines of the Kelantan legislative assembly sitting. He also claimed that it is better to enforce existing laws to protect young children from being forced into unwanted early marriages.

As the controversy surrounding the 41-year-old man who married an 11-year-old girl continues, another case of a child bride has been reported in Malaysia. The marriage involves a 19-year-old from Terengganu and a 13-year-old girl from Kelantan. They married at a mosque in Kampung Pulau Nibong on June 20. Ibrahim Husin, 67, the kadi who performed the akad nikah, said he was approached by the couple, who came with two witnesses, and a wali, who was the bride's uncle.

Malaysia plans to tighten the requirements for child marriages in year 2019 to give legal protection to the minors. Subsequently, any marriage with minors with have to go through a stringent approval process involving Shariah Court Department, the Home Ministry, State Religious Council and Customary Courts.

Child marriage rates in Bangladesh are amongst the highest in the world. Every 2 out of 3 marriages involve child marriages. According to statistics from 2005, 49% of women then between 25 and 29 were married by the age of 15 in Bangladesh. According to a 2008 study, for each additional year a girl in rural Bangladesh is not married she will attend school an additional 0.22 years on average. The later girls were married, the more likely they were to utilize preventive health care. Married girls in the region were found to have less influence on family planning, higher rates of maternal mortality, and lower status in their husband's family than girls who married later. Another study found that women who married at age 18 or older were less likely to experience IPV (intimate partner violence) than those married before age 18. It also found that girls married before age 15 were at an even higher risk for IPV.

According to UNICEF's "State of the World's Children-2009" report, 47% of India's women aged 20-24 married before the legal age of 18, with 56% marrying before age 18 in rural areas. The report also showed that 40% of the world's child marriages occur in India. As with Africa, this UNICEF report is based on data that is derived from a small sample survey in 1999. The latest available UNICEF report for India uses 2004-2005 household survey data, on a small sample, and other scholars report lower incidence rates for India. According to Raj et al., the 2005 small sample household survey data suggests 22% of girls ever married aged 16-18, 20% of girls in India married between 13-16, and 2.6% married before age 13. According to 2011 nationwide census of India, the average age of marriage for women in India is 21. The child marriage rates in India, according to a 2009 representative survey, dropped to 7%. In its 2001 demographic report, the Census of India stated zero married girls below age 10, 1.4 million married girls out of 59.2 million girls in the age 10-14, and 11.3 million married girls out of 46.3 million girls in the age 15-19 (which includes 18-19 age group). For 2011, the Census of India reports child marriage rates dropping further to 3.7% of females aged less than 18 being married.

The Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929 was passed during the tenure of British rule on Colonial India. It forbade the marriage of a male younger than 21 or a female younger than 18 for Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and most people of India. However, this law did not and currently does not apply to India's 165 million Muslim population, and only applies to India's Hindu, Christian, Jain, Sikh and other religious minorities. This link of law and religion was formalized by the British colonial rule with the Muslim personal laws codified in the Indian Muslim Personal Law ( Shariat) Application Act of 1937. The age at which India's Muslim girls can legally marry, according to this Muslim Personal Law, is 9, and can be lower if her guardian ( wali) decides she is sexually mature. Over the last 25 years, All India Muslim Personal Law Board and other Muslim civil organizations have actively opposed India-wide laws and enforcement action against child marriages; they have argued that Indian Muslim families have a religious right to marry a girl aged 15 or even 12. Several states of India claim specially high child marriage rates in their Muslim and tribal communities. India, with a population of over 1.2 billion, has the world's highest total number of child marriages. It is a significant social issue. As of 2016, the situation has been legally rectified by The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006.

According to "National Plan of Action for Children 2005", published by Indian government's Department of Women and Child Development, set a goal to eliminate child marriage completely by 2010. In 2006, The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 was passed to prohibit solemnization of child marriages. This law states that men must be at least 21 years of age and women must but be at least 18 years of age to marry.

Some Muslim organizations planned to challenge the new law in the Supreme Court of India. In latter years, various high courts in India - including the Gujarat High Court, the Karnataka High Court and the Madras High Court - have ruled that the act prevails over any personal law (including Muslim personal law).

According to two 2013 reports, over 50% of all marriages in Pakistan involve girls less than 18 years old. Another UNICEF report claims 70 per cent of girls in Pakistan are married before the age of 16. As with India and Africa, the UNICEF data for Pakistan is from a small sample survey in the 1990s.

The exact number of child marriages in Pakistan below the age of 13 is unknown, but rising according to the United Nations.

Another custom in Pakistan, called or vani, involves village elders solving family disputes or settling unpaid debts by marrying off girls. The average marriage age of swara girls is between 5 and 9. Similarly, the custom of watta satta has been cited as a cause of child marriages in Pakistan.

Though the legal age of marriage in Iran is 13 years for girls and 15 for boys, there are cases of girls below the age of 10 being married.[full citation needed ] The same source pointed out that "child marriages are more common in socially backward rural areas often afflicted with high levels of illiteracy and drug addiction". In October 2019, a prosecutor annulled the marriage of an 11-year-old girl to her adult cousin in rural Iran, and said he was indicting the mullah (officiant) and the girl's parents for an illegal underage marriage. According to the Iranian Students News Agency, nearly 6,000 children are married each year in Iran.

The U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) examining child marriage in Iran has warned of a rising number of young girls forced into marriage in Iran. The Committee deplored the fact that the State party allows sexual intercourse involving girls as young as 9 lunar years and that other forms of sexual abuse of even younger children is not criminalized. CRC said that Tehran must "repeal all provisions that authorize, condone or lead to child sexual abuse" and called for the age of sexual consent to be increased from nine years old to 16. The Society For Protecting The Rights of The Child said that 43,459 girls aged under 15 married in 2009. In 2010, 716 girls under the age of 10 married, up from 449 in the year prior. On 8 March 2018 a member of the Tehran City Council, Shahrbanoo Amani said that there were 15,000 widows under the age of 15 in the country.

Each European country has its own laws; in both the European Union and the Council of Europe the marriageable age falls within the jurisdiction of individual member states. The Istanbul convention, the first legally binding instrument in Europe in the field of violence against women and domestic violence, only requires countries which ratify it to prohibit forced marriage (Article 37) and to ensure that forced marriages can be easily voided without further victimization (Article 32), but does not make any reference to a minimum age of marriage.

In the European Union, the general age of marriage as a right is 18 in all member states, except in Scotland where it is 16. When all exceptions are taken into account (such as judicial or parental consent), the minimum age is 16 in most countries, and in Estonia it is 15. In 6 countries marriage under 18 is completely prohibited. By contrast, in 6 countries there is no set minimum age, although all these countries require the authorization of a public authority (such as judge or social worker) for the marriage to take place.

Minimum age when all exceptions are taken into account

General age

none

18

Under 18 requires court permission, which may be given if there are serious reasons for such a marriage

18

18

Not possible to marry under the age of 18 for Swedish citizens since July 1, 2014. Authorities take a different approach to individuals who were already married when the arrive in Sweden, as during the European migrant crisis, the Swedish Migration Agency identified 132 married children, of which 65 were in Malmö.

16

18 (16 Scotland)

England and Wales: 16 with the consent of parents/guardians (and others in some cases) if under 18.

Northern Ireland: 16 with parental consent (with the court able to give consent in some cases).

Balkans/Eastern Europe

In these areas, child and forced marriages are associated with the Roma community and with some rural populations. However, such marriages are illegal in most of the countries from that area. In recent years, many of those countries have taken steps in order to curb these practices, including equalizing the marriageable age of both sexes (e.g. Romania in 2007, Ukraine in 2012). Therefore, most of those 'marriages' are informal unions (without legal recognition) and often arranged from very young ages. Such practices are common in Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania (in these countries the marriageable age is 18, and can only be lowered to 16 in special circumstances with judicial approval). A 2003 case involving the daughter of an informal 'gypsy king' of the area has made international news.

The Washington Post reported in April 2016 that "17 child brides" arrived in Belgium in 2015 and a further 7 so far in 2016. The same report added that "Between 2010 and 2013, the police registered at least 56 complaints about a forced marriage."

The Dutch government's National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children wrote that "between September 2015 and January 2016 around 60 child brides entered the Netherlands". At least one was 14 years old. The Washington Post reported that asylum centres in the Netherlands were "housing 20 child brides between ages 13 and 15" in 2015.

Abatement of marriageable age is an ultimate measure acceptable in cases of life threat, pregnancy and childbirth.

The marriageable age in the United Kingdom is 18, or 16 with consent of parents and guardians (and others in some cases), although in Scotland no parental consent is required over 16. Scotland and Andorra are the only European jurisdictions where 16 year-olds can marry as a right (i.e. without parental or court approval); see Marriageable age § Europe.

In the UK girls as young as 12 have been smuggled in to be brides of men in the Muslim community, according to a 2004 report in The Guardian. Girls trying to escape this child marriage can face death because this breaks the honor code of her husband and both families.

The Marquesas Islands have been noted for their sexual culture. Many sexual activities seen as taboo in Western cultures are viewed appropriate by the native culture. One of these differences is that children are introduced and educated to sex at a very young age. Contact with Western societies has changed many of these customs, so research into their pre-Western social history has to be done by reading antique writings. Children slept in the same room as their parents and were able to witness their parents while they had sex. Intercourse simulation became real penetration as soon as boys were physically able. Adults found simulation of sex by children to be funny. As children approached 11 attitudes shifted toward girls.[clarification needed ] When a child reaches adulthood, they are educated on sexual techniques by a much older adult.

The next day, as soon as it was light, we were surrounded by a still greater multitude of these people. There were now a hundred females at least; and they practised all the arts of lewd expression and gesture, to gain admission on board. It was with difficulty I could get my crew to obey the orders I had given on this subject. Amongst these females were some not more than ten years of age. But youth, it seems, is here no test of innocence; these infants, as I may call them, rivalled their mothers in the wantonness of their motions and the arts of allurement.

Adam Johann von Krusenstern in his book about the same expedition as Yuri's, reports that a father brought a 10- to 12-year-old girl on his ship, and she had sex with the crew. According to the book of Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu and Étienne Marchand, eight-year-old girls had sex and other unnatural acts in public.

Child marriage has lasting consequences on girls that last well beyond adolescence. Women married in their teens or earlier struggle with the health effects of pregnancy at a young age and often with little spacing between children. Early marriages followed by teen pregnancy also significantly increase birth complications and social isolation. In poor countries, early pregnancy limits or can even eliminate a woman's education options, affecting her economic independence. Girls in child marriages are more likely to suffer from domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and marital rape.

Child marriage threatens the health and life of girls. Complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the main cause of death among adolescent girls below age 19 in developing countries. Girls aged 15 to 19 are twice as likely to die in childbirth as women in their 20s, and girls under the age of 15 are five to seven times more likely to die during childbirth. These consequences are due largely to girls' physical immaturity wherefore the pelvis and birth canal are not fully developed. Teen pregnancy, particularly below age 15, increases risk of developing obstetric fistula, since their smaller pelvises make them prone to obstructed labor. Girls who give birth before the age of 15 have an 88% risk of developing fistula. Fistula leaves its victims with urine or fecal incontinence that causes lifelong complications with infection and pain. Unless surgically repaired, obstetric fistulas can cause years of permanent disability, shame to mothers, and can result in being shunned by the community. Married girls also have a higher risk of sexually transmitted diseases, cervical cancer, and malaria than non-married peers or girls who marry in their 20s.

Child marriage also threatens the lives of offspring. Mothers under the age of 18 years have 35 to 55% increased risk of delivering pre-term or having a low birth weight baby than a mother who is 19 years old. In addition, infant mortality rates are 60% higher when the mother is under 18 years old. Infants born to child mothers tend to have weaker immune systems and face a heightened risk of malnutrition.

Prevalence of child marriage may also be associated with higher rates of population growth, more cases of children left orphaned, and the accelerated spread of disease.

Child marriage often ends a girl's education, particularly in impoverished countries where child marriages are common. In addition, uneducated girls are more at risk for child marriage. Girls who have only a primary education are twice as likely to marry before age 18 than those with a secondary or higher education, and girls with no education are three times more likely to marry before age 18 than those with a secondary education. Early marriage impedes a young girl's ability to continue with her education as most drop out of school following marriage to focus their attention on domestic duties and having or raising children. Girls may be taken out of school years before they are married due to family or community beliefs that allocating resources for girls' education is unnecessary given that her primary roles will be that of wife and mother. Without education, girls and adult women have fewer opportunities to earn an income and financially provide for themselves and their children. This makes girls more vulnerable to persistent poverty if their spouses die, abandon them, or divorce them. Given that girls in child marriages are often significantly younger than their husbands, they become widowed earlier in life and may face associated economic and social challenges for a greater portion of their life than women who marry later.

Married teenage girls with low levels of education suffer greater risk of social isolation and domestic violence than more educated women who marry as adults. Following marriage, girls frequently relocate to their husband's home and take on the domestic role of being a wife, which often involves relocating to another village or area. This transition may result in a young girl dropping out of school, moving away from her family and friends, and a loss of the social support that she once had. A husband's family may also have higher expectations for the girl's submissiveness to her husband and his family because of her youth. This sense of isolation from a support system can have severe mental health implications including depression.

Large age gaps between the child and her spouse makes her more vulnerable to domestic violence and marital rape. Girls who marry as children face severe and life-threatening marital violence at higher rates. Husbands in child marriages are often more than ten years older than their wives. This can increase the power and control a husband has over his wife and contribute to prevalence of spousal violence. Early marriage places young girls in a vulnerable situation of being completely dependent on her husband. Domestic and sexual violence from their husbands has lifelong, devastating mental health consequences for young girls because they are at a formative stage of psychological development. These mental health consequences of spousal violence can include depression and suicidal thoughts. Child brides, particularly in situations such as vani, also face social isolation, emotional abuse and discrimination in the homes of their husbands and in-laws.

The United Nations, through a series of conventions has declared child marriage a violation of human rights. The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination of Women ('CEDAW'), the Committee on the Rights of the Child ('CRC'), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights form the international standard against child marriage. Child marriages impact violates a range of women's interconnected rights such as equality on grounds of sex and age, to receive the highest attainable standard of health, to be free from slavery, access to education, freedom of movement, freedom from violence, reproductive rights, and the right to consensual marriage. The consequence of these violations impact woman, her children and the broader society.[how? ]

High rates of child marriage negatively impact countries' economic development because of early marriages' impact on girls' education and labor market participation. Some researchers and activists note that high rates of child marriage prevent significant progress toward each of the eight Millennium Development Goals and global efforts to reduce poverty due to its effects on educational attainment, economic and political participation, and health.

In December 2011 a resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (A/RES/66/170) designated October 11 as the International Day of the Girl Child. On October 11, 2012 the first International Day of the Girl Child was held, the theme of which was ending child marriage.

In 2013 the first United Nations Human Rights Council resolution against child, early, and forced marriages was adopted; it recognizes child marriage as a human rights violation and pledges to eliminate the practice as part of the U.N.'s post-2015 global development agenda.

Programs to prevent child marriage have taken several different approaches. Various initiatives have aimed to empower young girls, educate parents on the associated risks, change community perceptions, support girls' education, and provide economic opportunities for girls and their families through means other than marriage. A survey of a variety of prevention programs found that initiatives were most effect when they combined efforts to address financial constraints, education, and limited employment of women.

Other programs have addressed child marriage less directly through a variety of programming related to girls' empowerment, education, sexual and reproductive health, financial literacy, life skills, communication skills, and community mobilization.

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49. ^ Charles, Lorraine (2013). "Syrian and Palestinian Syrian Refugees in Lebanon: The Plight of Women and Children". Journal of International Women's Studies.

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52. ^ Yount, Kathryn M.; Crandall, AliceAnn; Cheong, Yuk Fai; Osypuk, Theresa L.; Bates, Lisa M.; Naved, Ruchira T.; Schuler, Sidney Ruth (1 December 2016). "Child Marriage and Intimate Partner Violence in Rural Bangladesh: A Longitudinal Multilevel Analysis". Demography. 53 (6): 1821-1852. doi:10.1007/s13524-016-0520-8. ISSN 1533-7790. PMC 5568420. PMID 27812927.

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68. ^ Doyle, Alister (21 April 2016). "Child brides sometimes tolerated in Nordic asylum centers despite bans". Reuters (Oslo). 10 of those aged under 16 - the minimum local age for sex or marriage - were married and four had children, the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) said. Of the 10 "some live in adult asylum centers, some in their own rooms and some with their partners", it said in emailed replies to Reuters questions ... Minister Inger Støjberg said that she would "stop housing child brides in asylum centers" after a review found dozens of cases of girls living with older men. ... authorities said that at least 70 girls under 18 were married in asylum centers run by municipalities including Stockholm and Malmo.

69. ^ Ishaan, Ishaan (1 April 2016). "Refugee child bride went on a hunger strike after Belgium separated her from husband". The Washington Post. Official figures indicate some 17 child brides arrived among the refugee influx last year and another seven this year ... Belgium has had wider concerns over the prevalence of forced child marriages among some of the country's communities. Between 2010 and 2013, the police registered at least 56 complaints about a forced marriage.

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71. ^ Ishaan, Ishaan (1 April 2016). "Refugee child bride went on a hunger strike after Belgium separated her from husband". The Washington Post. Last year, asylum centers next door in the Netherlands were reportedly housing 20 child brides between ages 13 and 15.

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Child marriage is a marriage or similar union, formal or informal, between a child and an adult or another child under a certain age, typically age eighteen. The vast majority of child marriages are between a girl and a man, and are rooted in gender inequality.

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UNICEF | Children's Rights & Emergency Relief Organization

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Child marriage

Child marriage, defined as a formal marriage or informal union before age 18, is a reality for both boys and girls, although girls are disproportionately the most affected. Child marriage is widespread and can lead to a lifetime of disadvantage and deprivation.

UNICEF data released in 2014 show that while prevalence has decreased slightly over the past three decades, rates of progress need to be scaled up dramatically, simply to offset population growth in the countries where the practices are most common.

Worldwide, more than 700 million women alive today were married as children. More than 1 in 3 - or some 250 million - were married before 15. Girls who marry before they turn 18 are less likely to remain in school and more likely to experience domestic violence. Young teenage girls are more likely to die due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth than women in their 20s; their infants are more likely to be stillborn or die in the first month of life.

While data from 47 countries show that, overall, the median age at first marriage is gradually increasing, this improvement has been limited primarily to girls of families with higher incomes. But without far more intensive and sustained action now from all parts of society, hundreds of millions more girls will suffer profound, permanent, and utterly unnecessary harm:

- If rates of decline seen in the past three decades are sustained, the impact of population growth means the number of women married as children (more than 700 million) will remain flat through 2050;
- Doubling the rate of decline would bring the number of women married as children down to 570 million by 2030 and 450 million by 2050.

Evidence shows that girls who marry early often abandon formal education and become pregnant. Maternal deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth are an important component of mortality for girls aged 15-19 worldwide, accounting for 70,000 deaths each year (UNICEF, State of the World's Children, 2009). If a mother is under the age of 18, her infant's risk of dying in its first year of life is 60 per cent greater than that of an infant born to a mother older than 19 (UNICEF, State of the World's Children, 2009). Even if the child survives, he or she is more likely to suffer from low birth weight, under nutrition and late physical and cognitive development (UNICEF, State of the World's Children, 2009). Child brides are at risk of violence, abuse and exploitation (UNICEF, State of the World's Children, 2009). Finally, child marriage often results in separation from family and friends and lack of freedom to participate in community activities, which can all have major consequences on girls' mental and physical well-being.

Where prevalent, child marriage functions as a social norm. Marrying girls under 18 years old is rooted in gender discrimination, encouraging premature and continuous child bearing and giving preference to boys' education. Child marriage is also a strategy for economic survival as families marry off their daughters at an early age to reduce their economic burden.

Empowering girls and women and ensuring girls and boys are healthy is at the core of UNICEF's mission. Because UNICEF works across multiple sectors, and because it works both with high-level decision makers as well as with grassroots community organizations, it is uniquely positioned to identify and address some of the systemic and underlying factors that pose a challenge to reproductive health, rights and gender equality.

UNICEF is committed to efforts to end child marriage and is able to use its global leadership position, its mandate to provide data and evidence on child marriage, and its broad field-based programming in various sectors to bring about change on this issue. In 2012, UNICEF was instrumental in organizing the inaugural International Day of the Girl Child, which had child marriage as its theme. The event raised awareness of the issue and helped refocus attention on this harmful practice.

Addressing child marriage requires recognition of the various factors that contribute to the perpetuation of the practice. These include economic factors (e.g., the need to support many children, paying a lower dowry), structural factors (e.g., lack of educational opportunities), and social factors (e.g., sense of tradition and social obligation, risk of pregnancy out of wedlock, avoiding criticism whereby older unmarried girls may be considered impure).

For more data on child marriage, visit http://data.unicef.org/child-protection/child-marriage

Visit the resources page for more information.

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Child marriage, defined as a formal marriage or informal union before age 18, is a reality for both boys and girls, although girls are disproportionately the most affected. Child marriage is widespread and can lead to a lifetime of disadvantage and deprivation.

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Child marriage is the formal (or informal) marriage of a child under the age of 18 - generally the marriage of a young girl to an older boy or man. There are approximately 700 million women around the world today who were married as girls; a third of them were married before their 15th birthdays.

Forcing a young girl into marriage generally means she will be separated from her family and friends and transferred to her husband like a piece of property. In an instant, she will be expected to become a woman who keeps house and raises a family, rather than play and study like the child she is.

Child brides are often made to leave school, are more likely to experience domestic violence, and are at higher risk of dying from pregnancy and childbirth complications - as are the children of child brides.

Young girls who are married off are more likely to have children while still physically immature. They are psychologically unprepared and unequipped to become mothers, which means they tend to have more health problems during pregnancy and childbirth due to inadequate health care and their babies have a reduced chance for survival.

"Motherhood is hard. When [babies] get sick, you don't know why. I don't have experience and don't know what to do with him, probably because of my age. I sleep very little," a 14-year-old wife and mother told the New York Times.

By robbing girls of a chance to learn, grow, and fully realize their potential, child marriage systematically disempowers them. It ensures that they remain dependent on others all their lives, strips them of their agency, and hands control over their lives to someone else.

Where's the wedding?

Child marriage is defined differently in each country, and occurs in disproportionately high numbers in developing countries, particularly in Africa and the South Asia region.

But because a child under the age of 18 is just that - a child - he or she should not be forced into marriage for any reason.

Whether the marriage is recognized under law, or is an informal union, forced marriage violates girls' right to education, security, and health. It is a form of discrimination against girls and a violation of human rights and so it is a global problem.

India has more than 10 million child brides, the most of any country in the world, followed by Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Brazil. Bangladesh has more than 2 million child brides, despite the legal minimum age of marriage being 18; unfortunately, the law is rarely enforced.

In Niger, 77 percent of women between the ages of 20 and 49 were married before age 18, more than half of these girls' husbands are at least 10 years older than them. 68 percent of girls are married by age 18 in Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and 55 percent in Mali. In these countries, most girls will be married before they turn 18.

Nafissa, 17 from Niger, was married at 16. Child marriage is a rights violation and must end! #endchildmarriage pic.twitter.com/slPzTyXxK8
- UNICEF (@UNICEF) July 3, 2016

Child marriage occurs in these areas due to high levels of poverty, cultural norms, and lax, if any, laws - but it doesn't only happen there. The World Policy Center reports that 88 percent of countries have 18 as the minimum marriageable age, but allow younger children to marry with parental consent.

In Guatemala, 14 is the legal minimum marriageable age with parental consent, while Yemen has yet to set a legal minimum.

Even when there are laws making marriage before the age of 18 illegal, as in the United States, child marriage still happens. In New Jersey, 3,481 children were married between 1995 and 2012, mostly with parental consent between the ages of 16 and 17; however, 163 marriages were approved by judges for children between ages 13 and 15. 91 percent of these marriages were between a child and an adult.

No matter where in the world child marriage happens, its drivers are similar - " family honor," economic gain, security, and control.

Why does child marriage happen?

Child marriages are symptomatic of gender-based discrimination against girls and cultural norms that value girl less than boys.

In some cases, child marriage is just the norm. In southern Ethiopia, marriage is just the next phase of womanhood, following FGM and menstruation.

But in most cases, child marriage is the result of social norms, cultural beliefs, and poverty. According to a Human Rights Watch report, "global data shows that girls from the poorest 20 percent of families are twice as likely to marry before 18 as girls whose families are among the richest 20 percent."

Money plays a big part in the prevalence of child marriage.

In some cultures, girls and women are not seen as potential wage earners - they're considered a financial burden to the family. In these cases, families living in poverty who have several children may arrange a marriage for their child to reduce their economic burden: One less daughter to take care of means one less mouth to feed and one less education to pay for. Girls are also married off to offset debts or settle conflicts, effectively acting as a substitute for money.

Real girls tell their story of child marriage. https://t.co/ZALArUyGVN
- Global Citizen (@GlblCtzn) July 11, 2016

In cultures where there is a dowry paid by the bride's family, it may be beneficial to arrange an early marriage for a girl for a lower bride price, or to simultaneously arrange a younger daughter's marriage with an older daughter - a sort of cheaper, "package deal." An example of this occurred in Yemen: 13-year-old girl married a man twice her age, while her brother married her husband's sister. The girl died four days later from internal bleeding likely due to sexual activity.

Dowries paid by the bride's family are not standard in all cultures; in sub-Saharan Africa, the opposite is often true - a price is paid to the bride's family for the girl, and a younger girl fetches a higher price.

"Families are using child marriage, as an alternative, as a survival strategy [against...] food insecurity," UNICEF's chief child protection officer in Niger has said.

On top of that, families who cannot afford to feed or educate their daughters may view marriage as her next best option.

Though it is frequently a key motivator, money is not the only reason for child marriages. Many cultures' non-virgin girls are considered ruined and unsuitable for marriage, as a result, families marry off their young daughters to ensure they remain virgins until marriage, to prevent babies out-of-wedlock, and to maximize her childbearing years. A younger girl can also be more easily controlled and shaped into an obedient wife.

Unfortunately, because of the cultural emphasis on virginity, child marriage is seen as a legitimate way to protect girls in unsafe environments.

One mother in Bangladesh explained, "she knew it was wrong to marry [her daughter off] very early, but ... marriage is seen as a cover of respect and protection by women. By not going to school, it reduces the risk of being sexually active outside the house or being harassed while commuting."

In Syria and in tightly packed refugee camps, mothers are afraid for their daughters' safety and "respectability." This fear has lead to an increase in the number of child marriages in Syria. Mothers are suddenly finding themselves the head of the household for the first time, fearful of impact of the ongoing war they believe that their daughters are less likely to be physically or sexually assaulted and harassed if they are married and have the protection of a man.

"It was much better for her to get married, even though she was still a child, than to be raped by a soldier," one mother said.

Meanwhile, orphaned Syrians in Jordan's refugee camps are being married off by relatives. Desperate to protect their daughters, mothers are marrying off their own daughters, hoping to give them better lives - or hoping men from the Gulf States seeking brides will pay for a young wife (the going price is reportedly between $2,800 and $14,000). A third of refugee marriages in Jordan now include a girl under the age of 18.

Taking action and making progress

Child marriage is slowly becoming less common around the world. Today, one in four girls was married as a child, as opposed to one in three in the 1980s.

The Global Goals have set a target to end child marriage by 2030 and the UN Human Rights Council reached a consensus and adopted a resolution against child marriage. International efforts have been supported by the national efforts of countries like Burkina Faso, Nepal, and Egypt that have all developed strategies and action plans to bolster their current efforts to end child marriage. Guatemala and Chad have raised their minimum age of marriage.

Tanzania recently announced that a man who marries or impregnates a girl of school-going age faces 30 years in prison. "Girls who are married off at a young age are being denied the freedom to make informed decisions later in life," said the head of the Tanzanian women's rights group TAMWA. However, Tanzania's law exempts child marriages where parental consent was given.

Gambia outlaws child marriage 'as from today' #LevelTheLaw https://t.co/LwGal4axz4 pic.twitter.com/es7uK9l89N
- GlobalCitizenImpact (@GlblCtznImpact) July 12, 2016

Gambia is taking it one step further with a strict ban on child marriage that sentences not only a man who marries a child to 20 years in prison, but also the girl's parents. People with knowledge of the plans and marriage, but did not report the marriage, could also receive a 10-year sentence. While this harsh law will hopefully deter parents from marrying off their daughters, it also raises the question of whether or not children would be better off without their parents in this situation.

Though there has been progress there are still 22 million girls who are married right now, and many more getting married every day.

Where do we go from here?

We need to challenge norms that reinforce the idea that girls are inferior to boys and we need to empower girls to be their own agents of change. Providing girls with equal access to quality education and allowing them to complete their studies will enable them to support themselves and lead fulfilled, independent lives. And we need to hear their voices by creating safe spaces and channels for them to speak up for what they want and speak out against harmful practices.

Girls who are allowed to stay with their families and stay in school are able to more fully engage in society, to become financially independent, to care for their families, and themselves - and ultimately, to work toward ending poverty.

"There are so many girls who do not have [a vision] for their future or any hope." -@sonitaalizadeh https://t.co/AHxlWBStow#Music4Dev
- World Bank (@WorldBank) July 9, 2016

We need to level the law and criminalize gender-based discrimination against girls to ensure that they are equally valued as people, so that these girls can grow in the empowered women they were always meant to be.

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Child Marriage: Everything You Need to Know

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Child marriage is the formal (or informal) marriage of a child under the age of 18 - generally the marriage of a young girl to an older boy or man. There are approximately 700 million women around the world today who were married as girls; a third of them were married before their 15th birthdays.

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More than 650 million women alive today already suffer the direct consequences of child marriage.

Globally, the rates of child marriage are slowly declining but progress isn't happening fast enough.

If pre-pandemic trends continue, 150 million more girls will be married by 2030 [2]. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, this may increase by a further 13 million girls [3].

Child marriage violates girls' rights to health, education and opportunity.

Child marriage is any formal marriage or informal union where one or both parties are under 18 years of age. It is rooted in gender inequality.

Girls who formally marry or cohabit as if married before the age of 18 are more likely to have early pregnancies, experience dangerous complications in pregnancy and childbirth, acquire HIV, and experience domestic violence. Ending child marriage will improve the health of millions of girls, and their children. Find out more on our Health learning page.

When a girl gets married she is often expected to drop out of school to look after the home, children and extended family. For the same reasons - and sometimes because of official school or national policies - it is difficult for married girls, pregnant girls and young mothers to return to school. Find out more on our Education learning page.

When they marry as children, girls miss out on developing the skills, knowledge and confidence they need to make informed decisions, negotiate, access paid employment and live independent lives. With little access to education and economic opportunities, girls and their families are more likely to live in poverty. Find out more on our Economic Justice learning page (coming soon).

Systems that undervalue the contribution and participation of girls and women limit their own possibilities for growth, stability and transformation.

Child marriage directly hinders the achievement of at least six of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Find out more on our SDG and Gender learning pages (coming soon).

Ending child marriage and guaranteeing girls' rights means a fairer, more secure and prosperous future for us all.

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Child marriage is a global issue. It is fuelled by gender inequality, poverty, social norms and insecurity, and has devastating consequences all over the world. Here, you can discover more about the extent and impacts of child marriage and the progress we've made towards ending it.

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Memory Banda: A warrior's cry against child marriage

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Memory Banda's life took a divergent path from her sister's. When her sister reached puberty, she was sent to a traditional "initiation camp" that teaches girls "how to sexually please a man." She got pregnant there - at age 11. Banda, however, refused to go.

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Kakenya Ntaiya: A girl who demanded school | TED

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In developing countries, one in every three girls is married before reaching age 18. Fear of premarital pregnancy, rape, hunger, and homelessness are all drivers of child marriage, according to a World Vision report. Other drivers include harmful traditional practices and the lack of alternative opportunities for girls - in particular the lack of opportunity to go to school.

Girls trapped in child marriage tend to be poor, under-educated, and living in rural areas where birth and death rates are high and where conflict is common. They are also more likely to experience domestic violence, forced sexual relations, poor reproductive health, and lower levels of education.

World Vision works to reduce child marriage by enforcing existing laws that prohibit child marriage; improving access to quality education; creating safe areas for women and girls during humanitarian emergencies; and mobilizing enlightened community leaders and parents to combat gender prejudices.

Forced to marry at age 14

It was a pretty and ordinary morning in rural Mozambique when Belita, 14, received heartbreaking news. She would soon be forced to marry.

"This man comes to my house to ask my parents to marry me this year," she recalls. "They accepted."

After learning the news, Belita crossed paths with child parliament members at her school. "I learned a lot of things about children's rights and the consequences of child marriage that day," she says about their conversation. World Vision-supported child parliament programs, in partnership with local governments, help to raise children's awareness of their rights and develop their leadership skills.

Belita was determined to change her fate. She tried to make her parents change their mind - but to no avail. They insisted that she would marry, no matter what it took.

Top countries for child marriage

Mozambique has a very high rate of child marriage, ranking number 10 in the world.

According the 2015 UNICEF report, State of the World's Children, the countries with the highest rates of child marriage before age 18 are:

1. Niger* - 76 percent

2. Central African Republic - 68 percent

3. Chad* - 68 percent

4. Bangladesh* - 65 percent

5. Mali* - 55 percent

6. Guinea - 52 percent

7. South Sudan* - 52 percent

8. Burkina Faso - 52 percent

9. Malawi* - 50 percent

10. Mozambique - 48 percent

Of the 25 countries with the highest rates of child marriage, the majority are affected by conflict, fragility, or natural disasters.
*Countries where World Vision works to help build communities that promote and provide for women's and girls' development along with men and boys.
A transformative conversation saves Belita

The young parliamentarians told World Vision staff and the school council about Belita's dilemma.

"We immediately called Belita's parents and the man who was supposed to marry her, along with his family, to my office," explained the school headmaster, Mr. Daniel Dimisseque. "We discussed the issue, showing them how harmful this could be to the child."

As a result of the discussion, all agreed that an child marriage was not in Belita's best interests.

To ensure that the child marriage would not take place, the parents and the man signed a declaration stating that if Belita is married before she turns 18, charges would be presented to the police.

Now Belita has one goal for her life. "All I want is to keep studying to become a teacher," she says.

Assertive, concerted action to eliminate child marriage

"We believe that the elimination of child marriage in Mozambique requires more assertive, concerted action amongst key stakeholders," explains Persilia Muianga, a World Vision child protection manager in Mozambique.

To that end, World Vision helps organize local leaders, parents, educators, law enforcers, and social services to support girls in pursuing education and avoiding child marriage. And World Vision children's clubs, like the child parliament that influenced Belita, empower girls with information, particularly on child rights and healthy development.

Belita now serves other children in her community as a member of the local child parliament. "I would not attain this dream," she says, "if it was not that meeting with child parliament."

How you can help end child marriage

Pray for girls in cultures where child marriage is accepted and encouraged. Pray that girls would gain access to education and be protected from this unhealthy practice.

Make a one-time donation to our girls and women education fund. You can help provide resources such as school scholarships, art and music instruction, vocational training, and gender equality training. These resources help girls to stay in school, stay unmarried through their teens, and develop their innate leadership abilities - ultimately building a stronger, healthier society.

Sponsor a girl today. By investing in the life of a girl in need, you'll help her to stay in school and avoid child marriage, while providing access to the resources she needs to become a healthy, productive adult.

Contributors: Antonio Simão Matimbe and James Addis, World Vision staff.

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Untying the knot: 10 worst places for child marriage | World Vision

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In developing countries, one in every three girls is married before reaching age 18. Fear of premarital pregnancy, rape, hunger, and homelessness are all drivers of child marriage, according to a World Vision report. Other drivers include harmful traditional practices and the lack of alternative opportunities for girls - in particular the lack of opportunity to go to school.

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Dare to Question What Are We Going To Do About Child Brides: Bader Ben Hirsi at TEDxMarrakeshv

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Breaking the Cycle of Child Marriages: Zarif Sahin at TEDxRockCreekPark

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Child Brides - Child Marriage: What We Know . NOW | PBS

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About the Program Child Marriage Facts Maria's Journey Five Days in Niger Girls' Voices Education Take Action How You Can Help For Educators React Send an E-Card

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ICRW is leading efforts to find solutions that will eliminate the harmful traditional practice of child marriage.
Learn more "
Child Marriage Around the world

One third of girls in the developing world are married before the age of 18 and 1 in 9 are married before the age of 15.

In 2012, 70 million women 20-24 around the world had been married before the age of 18.

If present trends continue, 150 million girls will be married before their 18th birthday over the next decade. That's an average of 15 million girls each year.

While countries with the highest prevalence of child marriage are concentrated in Western and Sub-Saharan Africa, due to population size, the largest number of child brides reside in South Asia.

Poverty and Child Marriage

Girls living in poor households are almost twice as likely to marry before 18 than girls in higher income households.

More than half of the girls in Bangladesh, Mali, Mozambique and Niger are married before age 18. In these same countries, more than 75 percent of people live on less than $2 a day.

Education and Child Marriage

Girls with higher levels of schooling are less likely to marry as children. In Mozambique, some 60 percent of girls with no education are married by 18, compared to 10 percent of girls with secondary schooling and less than one percent of girls with higher education.

Educating adolescent girls has been a critical factor in increasing the age of marriage in a number of developing countries, including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Thailand.

Health and Child Marriage

Pregnancy is consistently among the leading causes of death for girls ages 15 to 19 worldwide.

Child brides often face a higher risk of contracting HIV because they often marry an older man with more sexual experience. Girls ages 15 - 19 are 2 to 6 times more likely to contract HIV than boys of the same age in sub-Saharan Africa.

Violence and Child Marriage

Girls who marry before 18 are more likely to experience domestic violence than their peers who marry later. A study conducted by ICRW in two states in India found that girls who were married before 18 were twice as likely to report being beaten, slapped or threatened by their husbands than girls who married later.

Child brides often show signs symptomatic of sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress such as feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and severe depression.

Religion and Child Marriage

No one religious affiliation is associated with child marriage. Rather, a variety of religions are associated with child marriage in countries throughout the world.

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Child Marriage Facts and Figures - ICRW | PASSION. PROOF. POWER.

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ICRW is leading efforts to find solutions that will eliminate the harmful traditional practice of child marriage. Learn more " One third of girls in the developing world are married before the age of 18 and 1 in 9 are married before the age of 15.

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Denial of rights

Child marriage denies girls the right to choose whom and when to marry - one of life's most important decisions. Choosing one's partner is a major decision, one that should be made freely and without fear or coercion. On this, virtually all countries agree.

Despite near-universal commitments to end child marriage, approximately one in five girls is married before age 18. This is an average of tens of thousands of girls every single day.

Impact on a girl's health, future and family

Child marriage directly threatens girls' health and well-being. Marriage is often followed by pregnancy, even if a girl is not yet physically or mentally ready. In developing countries, nine out of 10 births to adolescent girls occur within a marriage or a union. In these countries, complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death among adolescent girls aged 15 to 19.

Girls who are married may also be exposed to sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. When girls marry, they are often forced to drop out of school so they can assume household responsibilities. This is a denial of their right to an education. Girls who leave school have worse health and economic outcomes than those who stay in school, and eventually their children fare worse as well.

Factors contributing to child marriage

Child marriage is the toxic product of poverty and gender inequality. Girls in child marriages tend to be less educated, and they are more likely to live in rural areas. Many impoverished parents believe that marriage will secure their daughters' future by ensuring that another family will be responsible for their care. This is also true in humanitarian crises, when many parents fear they will be unable to protect or care for their daughters. Some mistakenly believe marriage will protect their daughters from sexual violence, which is often exacerbated in times of crisis.

Some parents see their daughters as burdens or commodities. Dowries complicate the issue : In places where the bride's family pays a dowry to the groom's family, younger brides typically command smaller dowries, creating an incentive for parents to marry their daughters off early. In places where the groom's family pays a bride price, parents in difficult circumstances may marry off their daughters as a source of income.

More often than not, child marriage is the outcome of having few choices. When girls have a choice, they marry later.

How to end child marriage

Global child marriage rates are slowly falling. Recent data show that 25 million child marriages were prevented in the last decade. Around 2000, one in three women between the ages of 20 and 24 reported they had been married as children. In 2018, this number is around one in five.

Still, progress has been uneven, and child marriage is not declining fast enough. Because of population growth in regions where child marriage is more prevalent, the total number of child marriages is projected to increase by 2030. To change this, we must accelerate our actions to end child marriage.

Ending child marriage requires action at many levels. Existing laws against child marriage should be enforced, especially when girls at risk of child marriage, or who are already married, seek protection and justice . And where it is not yet the case, the legal age of marriage should be raised to 18. But laws only provide the framework for action against child marriage. Practices people deem acceptable are unlikely to disappear through legislation alone.

Governments, civil society and other partners must work together to ensure girls have access to education, health information and services, and life-skills training. Girls who are able to stay in school and remain healthy enjoy a broader range of options, and they are more likely to be able to avoid child marriage.

And, importantly, girls who are already married need to be supported. Married girls need reproductive health services to help them avoid early pregnancy. Those who become pregnant need access to appropriate care throughout pregnancy, childbirth and in the post-partum period. They should be supported, if they choose, in returning to formal or non-formal school.

Together, these measures lead to healthier families, higher levels of gender equality and, in turn, stronger societies and more vibrant economies. No society can afford the lost opportunity, waste of talent, or personal exploitation that child marriage causes.

UNFPA's role

UNFPA is committed to delivering concrete, evidence-based solutions to child marriage, with an emphasis on efforts that can be scaled-up, sustained and produce measurable results . UNFPA works with governments and civil society partners, at all levels, to promote and protect the human rights of girls, including assisting with the development of policies, programmes and legislation to address and curtail the practice of child marriage. Many of these efforts, such as the Accelerate Action to End Child Marriage, empower girls to know and exercise their human rights, including their right to choose, as adults, whom to Action for Adolescent Girls programme and the UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to marry.
Last updated 5 April 2018

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Child marriage is a human rights violation. Despite laws against it, the practice remains widespread, in part because of persistent poverty and gender inequality. In developing countries, one in every five girls is married before reaching age 18. One in nine is married under age 15.

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Child marriage remains widespread in developing countries, disproportionately affecting girls and endangering their lives and livelihoods. Rooted in cultural tradition and poverty, the practice not only violates human rights laws but also threatens stability and economic development.

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HOW DOES PLAN INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT YOUNG PEOPLE AFFECTED BY EARLY AND FORCED MARRIAGE?

Plan International's global programme, 18+ (Ending Child, Early and Forced Marriage) works at local, national and international levels to enable millions of girls to avoid marriage, stay in school and decide for themselves whether and when to marry. The programme takes a holistic approach to identify and address the root causes of this harmful tradition and identify opportunities for change.

Plan International helps children and young people, as well as parents, community leaders and governments, to identify, understand and end harmful practices. Crucially, we ensure that children - particularly girls - are involved in the process and empowered to claim their rights.

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Plan International's global programme, 18+ (Ending Child, Early and Forced Marriage) works at local, national and international levels to enable millions of girls to avoid marriage, stay in school and decide for themselves whether and when to marry. The programme takes a holistic approach to identify and address the root causes of this harmful tradition and identify opportunities for change.