Nine countries have in recent years made positive changes in their laws that protect children from marrying before reaching adulthood, yet experts say the world is far from seeing the phenomenon go away.
Between 2015 and 2017, Chad, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Panama and Zimbabwe have increased the minimum marriage age for children to 18, shows a new report put together by the World Bank, Save the Children, the Global Partnership for Education and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation.
Child marriages gained new international attention this past week as an international conference in Senegal examined the issue, including strategies to curb to reduce the number of minors being married off.
Child marriage is considered a violation of human rights that the United Nations is fighting to end by 2030. Experts agree that increasing the age for marriage is beneficial, but just a small step in a much more complicated process.
“Increasingly we are finding out that there is a menu of things that you need to have in place to respond to children who are at risk of being married, and legislation is just one of them,” says Nankali Maksud, an expert on child marriage for UNICEF, the U.N. program devoted to helping children and mothers in developing countries.
The “menu” needs to go beyond age-restricting legislation and respond to the many risks that children, especially girls face. According to the report, child brides are more likely to have children at a younger age and experience health and emotional problems, drop out of school, and experience violence in their household.
Yet even when legislation is in place, laws can only do so much, as countries can find ways to bend their own rules. Bangladesh, for example, passed legislation last February that allows people under the age of 18 to marry under parental or court consent. Experts say the reasons for adopting such exceptions are mainly cultural and have to do with collective values.
“When we had discussions with them [people in Bangladesh] on the topic, they said if a girl got raped at 16 and she got pregnant, the way to reduce stigma around the situation for the girl is to get married,” Maksud says. Additionally, some segments of populations want to match the age for having sex with the age for marriage, Maksud adds.
Laws can also be conflicting, according to Voice of America. This was the case in Malawi in 2015, when that country’s government adopted the Marriage, Divorce and Family Relations Act that raised the legal marrying age from 15 to 18. Yet the constitution of the country, which was later amended, still allowed children to marry at 15 with parental consent.
To create policies that best respond to the global challenges of fighting against child marriage, experts agree that more than implementing legislation, it is very important to understand local contexts and particularities of regions, as the reasons why the phenomenon exists in the first place varies from country to country.
“Recently, in Zambia, they found out that, contrary to all our beliefs, the situation wasn’t caused by old men trying to get married with young girls,” Maksud says. “It is girls, as young as 14 or 15, coming from families with 15 to 16 children, where food is not enough and people are sleeping all over each other, that choose to get married to get out of this situation.”
Another important goal is persuading girls to stay in school, as experts say research shows there is a direct correlation between the level of education in a region and the number of child marriages.
“If you look at trends over time, those countries that have been able to build a good affordable education system with schools nearby and things to learn in those schools, have managed to reduce child marriage more substantially,” says Quentin Wodon, lead economist at World Bank and author of the report.
Tackling the situation is becoming more pressing as numbers are increasing. Worldwide, 68 percent of all child marriages are illegal — meaning the person is younger than 18 and lack s parental consent, according to the report produced by the World Bank and its partners. Overall , 82.8 million girls aged 10 to 17 in 112 countries were not protected by legislation against child marriage, the report added. Around 7.5 million girls become spouses every year.
In the past two years, the number of girls between the ages 10 and 17 in the 112 countries studied by the report has increased from 11.3 million in 2015 to 11.5 in 2017. When considering exceptions given by parental consent, the number of girls not protected against child marriage increased from 52.5 million to 58 million.
Child marriages create hundreds of billions of dollars of additional costs for countries, experts say. Youth who have their own children find obtaining education more difficult, and in turn must settle for lower-paying jobs. Countries also may face higher health-care costs and mortality rates that come from children having babies.
In Africa alone, the number of people under 18 is expected to reach 750 million by 2030, according to the United Nations.
“If we were able to end child marriage today, by 2030 the benefit for the population globally, every year, would be of 600 to 700 billion dollars,” concludes Wodon, the World Bank economist.
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More Work Needed to Reduce World’s Number of Child Marriages, Experts Say originally appeared on usnews.com
