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Girls Not Brides does not do a good job of presenting the information. All they have is a statistic and no links to other relevant articles. Since there is no information it is hard to tell whether there is truly bias.

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The Global Citizen does a phenomenal job presenting the topic of child brides. Not only do they provide quotes from professionals, they also provide a great amount of statistics to back their claims. I find little to no bias in this article. " Global Citizen campaigns against child marriage, which often prevents girls from attaining a full education."

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The Human Rights Watch does a semi-decent job of presenting the topic. The content of the article is there, but there isn't much to read. Also there's the bias of being a group targeting to help those who are having their rights abused. "If the government, assisted by its development partners, does not combat child marriage it could have serious implications for South Sudan’s future development."

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The LA Times actually presents the topic very well. They delve deep into the issues that child brides face without getting too gruesome for readers. I don't find any bias throughout this article, given a child bride was interviewed and her words were spread rather than the interviewer only. "My mother didn't say anything, but you could tell from her face how unhappy she was," Anur said. "But she had no voice. As a woman, there was nothing she could do. She just looked so tired and weary."

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Child marriage remains widespread in developing countries across the world.

More girls in South Sudan are marrying at a young age amid the mass displacement and starvation that have accompanied civil war there, according to international aid agencies.
Read More: South Sudan: The Deadly Consequences of Child Marriage
According to UNICEF, 9% of South Sudanese girls were married by age 15, and 52% were married before their 18th birthday, in 2015. In the Rumbek region, that figure has spiked to more than 60% over the last year, according to Isaac Karkon, head of South Sudan's humanitarian arm in the region.

While child marriage is widely practiced, the increase has mostly been seen in the Lakes State and Babr el Ghazal regions in South Sudan. Cows are used for payments and dowries, which Human Rights Watch call a "key driver of child marriage" as families see daughters as a source of wealth.
Read More: Child Brides Sold For Cows: The Price of Being a Girl in South Sudan
Karkon said that people are dying from hunger. "So, if you have a mature daughter you give her up to let the rest survive," Karkon told The Associated Press.

In 2012, 13-year-old Eliza was forced by her father to marry a 35-year-old man from their village in the South Sudan town of Rumbek. She was traded for 50 cattle, according to The Associated Press, which did not use the girl's last name.

"The worst part was having sex," she told The Associated Press. "I don't know what he wanted from me and it was so painful."

Two years into the marriage at the age of 15, Eliza gave birth to a daughter. As the youngest of her husband's five wives, she said he neglected her and the baby, never providing medicine. After a few years of marriage, Eliza's father took her back. The husband didn't pay the dowry and her father didn't like the way she was being treated.

Today, Eliza is now studying to become a doctor, but she is the exception.

Some aid groups and local institutions are making efforts to reduce child marriage. South Sudan's leaders should "choose to prioritize legislation that explicitly sets 18 as the minimum age of marriage," The Human Rights Watch told the Associated Press.

"Poverty is pushing people into situations they might not have had to be in before," said Sister Orla Treacy to The Associated Press, head of the Irish-run Loreto Secondary School in Rumbek, the region's only all-girl boarding school.

Treacy and her staff require each girl's guardian to sign a form promising not to remove the child from school until she has graduated. So far, it appears to be working. When the policy began in 2008, 50% of the girls were being taken out of school for early marriage. Now the number stands at less than 2%.

Child marriage remains widespread in developing countries across the world.
Read More: Educating Girls, Ending Child Marriage
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, women between the ages of 20 to 24 who report on being married before eighteen, are found in South Asia and West and Central Africa, where an estimated two out of five girls are married as children.

In Syrian refugee communities in Jordan, child marriage has rapidly increased. Between 2011 and 2014, the rates of child marriages almost tripled, from 12% to just under 32%. In Lebanon, 41% of young displaced Syrian women are married before eighteen, according to Girls Not Brides, a global partnership to end child marriage.

Other countries included: Chad, northern Cameroon and Nigeria in Africa; Malaysia and Indonesia in Southeast Asia; and Afghanistan in the Middle East.

Global Citizen campaigns against child marriage, which often prevents girls from attaining a full education. You can take action here.

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13-Year-Old Traded to Man for 50 Cattle as Child Marriages in South Sudan Rise

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Child marriage remains widespread in developing countries across the world. More girls in South Sudan are marrying at a young age amid the mass displacement and starvation that have accompanied civil war there, according to international aid agencies.

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Almost half of South Sudanese girls between ages 15 and 19 are married, some as young as age 12. An egregious violation of women and girls' human rights, child marriage in South Sudan exacerbates the country's high levels of poverty, low levels of literacy, pronounced gender gaps in education, and soaring rates of maternal mortality-currently among the highest in the world.

Many families in South Sudan see child marriage as a means of accessing cattle, money, and other gifts by transferring wealth through the traditional payment of dowries. The practice of child marriage negatively shapes the experiences, status, and security of South Sudanese women and girls; violates their right to health, education, physical integrity, and to marry with free consent; and limits their progress and capacity to participate in all spheres of life.

If the government, assisted by its development partners, does not combat child marriage it could have serious implications for South Sudan's future development. Strong measures are needed to ensure protection for victims of child marriage and their access to effective support services, the development and implementation of guidelines for a coordinated government response, and comprehensive reform of South Sudanese marriage laws so that gender equality is a cornerstone of the country's development agenda.

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Almost half of South Sudanese girls between ages 15 and 19 are married, some as young as age 12. An egregious violation of women and girls' human rights, child marriage in South Sudan exacerbates the country's high levels of poverty, low levels of literacy, pronounced gender gaps in education, and soaring rates of maternal mortality-currently among the highest in the world.

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2013 marked the first year that UNICEF provided data on child marriage in South Sudan, Africa's newest state.

52% of girls in South Sudan are married before their 18th birthday [1].

Drivers

High levels of poverty, conflict, instability, low levels of literacy and gender gaps in education fuel child marriage in South Sudan. Girls and families often feel that they are escaping poverty by marrying young.

Many South Sudanese communities see child marriage as a way to protect girls from pre-marital sex and unwanted pregnancies. Families also marry off their daughters in exchange for a bride-price or other much-needed resources such as of cattle. [2]

South Sudan's lack of a strong legal framework, along with poor enforcement of existing laws, means that perpetrators are rarely bought to justice.

Latest developments

In February 2017, the Ministry of Gender, in collaboration with UNFPA East and Southern Africa, launched a taskforce to end child marriage. The taskforce is said to be developing a roadmap to end child marriage under the leadership of the Ministry of Gender. [3]

Sources

[1] UNICEF, State of the World's Children, 2016.

[2] Human Rights Watch, "This Old Man Can Feed Us, You Will Marry Him", Child and Forced Marriage in South Sudan, 2013.

[3] UNFPA South Sudan, tweet, 22 February 2017.

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South Sudan - Child Marriage Around The World. Girls Not Brides

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2013 marked the first year that UNICEF provided data on child marriage in South Sudan, Africa's newest state. 52% of girls in South Sudan are married before their 18th birthday [1]. High levels of poverty, conflict, instability, low levels of literacy and gender gaps in education fuel child marriage in South Sudan.

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When the girl was 16, her uncle told her he was taking her to the family village.

Excited about the trip, she packed the few things she had. She thought the plan was to meet relatives and see the birthplace of her father, who died when she was 10.

"My uncle needed cows," she explained.

Independence for South Sudan in 2011 brought widespread hopes for prosperity, an end to years of civil war and rudimentary rights for the new country's 11.3 million people. But little of that has materialized.

A wave of killings and sexual assaults has accompanied a new outbreak of fighting, and much of the nation remains trapped in deep poverty. Though South Sudan's assembly even before independence passed a law in 2008 limiting the marriage age to 18 and over, it is rarely enforced, particularly in rural areas.

Roughly 17% of girls marry before they are 15, and nearly a quarter marry between 15 and 17, according to the government's last survey in 2010. The vast majority of those marriages are thought to be families trading their daughters for cows.

The bride price is typically 20 to 40 cows, each worth up to $500. A girl who is seen as beautiful, fertile and of high social rank can bring as many as 200 cows.

The United Nations, which says the country has the world's fifth highest prevalence of child marriage, has attacked the practice as a violation of human rights, a serious impediment to literacy and a major cause of persistent poverty.

But attempts to wipe it out have faltered because under customary law here and elsewhere in Africa, women have fewer rights than men. The eight-year-old marriage law is resisted in many communities because it demands that impoverished rural families put at risk their biggest potential commodity: their daughters.

Once a girl is taken to village, there is no way back. Schools empty. Friends and sisters are suddenly gone. Some remain, kicking the dusty path to school, dreams still singing in their heads.

Some girls go meekly, melting away to a distant village to haul water and firewood, sweep, clean, wash, cook, give birth, work a lifetime.

When her father informed her that she would be married off to a man who was about 70, she explained, "I refused." She had fallen in love with another man when she was 13 - but the romance was unthinkable because he had no cows.

"If you want to kill me, kill me now because I don't want to go to a man I don't know," she said she told her father.

So he beat her. Her brother did worse: He needed the cows she would bring so he could marry the girl he wanted. So he took his machete, Keji said, and found her in the village square.

"He slashed me, and he cut my throat," she said. "The cut was deep, and I was taken to hospital."

Neither her brother nor father could be reached for an interview. The left side of her neck bears a scar about an inch long.

Keji tried running away to the capital of Juba, 53 miles and a three-hour drive on cratered dirt roads from her town of Terekeka on the Nile River. But her brother caught her and brought her back, she said.

Now 19, she was expecting to soon be married to the older man: "I don't have power. I'm finished. There's nowhere to go. There's nothing I can do."

To understand how women are valued here, consider the story of a 12-year-old girl killed by a hippo in a swamp a few years back. Thomas Buom, a 40-year-old canoe operator in the eastern town of Nyal, came upon the scene two hours after the attack.

"We were shocked, and we couldn't even talk," he recalled.

The tragedy of her death, however, wasn't the mere fact that a young girl had died. It was a sad situation, Buom explained, "because we lost that girl who would have been married off for cattle just three years later."

The price of a daughter in cows is determined in a negotiation between her father and would-be husband. Many daughters are married off to elderly suitors because those men tend to have the most cows.

Once girls are married, they are expected to work and bear many children, especially daughters, who are seen as assets to acquire more cattle. They obey their husbands or face violence.

Iklas Anur watched her older sister, Sumaya, suffer in an unhappy marriage after being sent to village.

She recounted the story under a shady tree in Terekeka as chickens and naked toddlers wandered in the dirt. Sumaya begged her father not to marry her off to an old man who had come calling. But the man had offered 30 cows, leaving her no say in the matter.

"My mother didn't say anything, but you could tell from her face how unhappy she was," Anur said. "But she had no voice. As a woman, there was nothing she could do. She just looked so tired and weary."

Sumaya fled back to her family, which promptly returned her to her husband. "The cows can't be given back," Anur said. "It's quite impossible."

Determined to avoid her sister's fate, Anur discovered a way to work within the system and found a man she liked who could pay 12 cows - enough to satisfy her father.

At 23, she still wishes she could have finished school instead of marrying. She knows she faces a lifetime of hard work.

Some families have shunned the tradition of collecting a bride price and instead have sent their daughters to school. But in a culture in which the value of a woman is measured in cows, those families are in the minority.

Just 7% of girls finish primary school, and fewer than 2% go to high school. Girls are three times more likely to die in childbirth than complete their studies, according to the U.N.

"As a girl, from a young age, you will be told to focus on being a good wife," said Lily Akol, a former deputy agriculture minister and one of the few women to earn a university degree. "Once you go and get educated, you are not seen as a good traditional African or South Sudanese girl."

Educated women are seen as arrogant, disrespectful and promiscuous, she said.

Phuong Nguyen, the UNICEF representative in South Sudan, said some families worry that sending girls to school exposes them to dangers such as sexual assault that could lower their value when it comes time to look for marriage offers.

For some girls, running away is the only escape.

In a shelter for vulnerable children in the capital, a 16-year-old girl told the story of how she had fled three years earlier after her father died and her brothers planned to marry her off.

Her mother secretly encouraged her to run. So one day, the girl pretended she was going to fetch water and never came back.

Like other girls who fled their families or their marriages, she spoke on condition that her name not be used, out of fear that she could be traced and returned.

She heard they married off her 13-year-old sister last year. "I cried for two days, and I couldn't even eat," she said.

Living in the shelter, lost from her family, she attends school and dreams of becoming the minister of education someday: "I'd make sure young girls are taken care of, and early marriage comes to an end so everyone can go to school."

A more likely fate for girls who fled to Juba are the brothels.

At one "lodge," as the establishments are known, the girls are as young as 13. One bony child with short hair, wearing a T-shirt and pants, could be mistaken for a boy.

Another was abandoned at age 9 and found on the street by a soldier. He sent the girl to live with his mother, then married her when she was 12. "Then I got his first child," she explained.

Now she is 23 and a widow, her husband killed in war three years ago. Their son lives with his grandmother.

Also here is the 19-year-old whose uncle took her to village three years ago to become the sixth wife of an elderly man.

The higher-ranking wives were constantly forcing her to fetch firewood and grind maize. "They all treated me like a child in their house," she recalled. "I didn't have enough food or clothing. They made me work so hard."

After less than a year, she fled and eventually wound up at the brothel. At first, she hoped she could stay there without having to sleep with men, but it doesn't work that way.

"I sell myself," she said. "It was a hard decision. I feel very uncomfortable. But I can get something to eat. I can dress myself with what I do. Some days I can go with only three men, and that's enough money."

She has vowed never to return to her husband, and her uncle has said he would kill her if she tried to return home.

Sometimes her life at the brothel feels so hard that when there are no customers, she just sleeps, to escape thinking at all.

Robyn Dixon and Sarah Hylton prepared this story as part of a fellowship with the International Women's Media Foundation.

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Child brides sold for cows: The price of being a girl in South Sudan

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When the girl was 16, her uncle told her he was taking her to the family village. Excited about the trip, she packed the few things she had. She thought the plan was to meet relatives and see the birthplace of her father, who died when she was 10.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.