Child Marriage: Recognizing It and Stopping It

Two hundred million girls might be alive today if they weren’t, well, girls.¹ That is how many female babies and girls the United Nations estimates have died because they were not born male and were rejected by their families. “Son preference,” as it is called, leads to the pervasive degradation and devaluing of women that can result in a child being given in marriage, a form of abuse that is alive and well in the 21st century.

The history of child marriage has its roots in the complex, cultural belief that female human life lacks value. Curses, dowries, employment, poverty and misplaced ideologies all contribute to the varied reasons a family would choose to give their little girl in marriage before the age of consent.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) defines marriage of children as “a formal or informal union where one or both parties are under the age of 18.”² Though this can and does happen to boys, it is predominantly an issue for girls.

Child marriage statistics include the following:

• 12 million girls are married each year before the age of 18.³
• 650 million women living in the world today were given in marriage before 18.³
• 19% of all married women worldwide from 2014-2020 were married before 18.³
• In the same time period, Niger led the world with 76% of its women married before 18.³

Ending child marriage is a matter of restoring human rights to millions of girls and women and strengthening communities as a whole. The International Center for Research on Women and the World Bank estimate that marrying girls too young costs the world economy trillions of dollars.⁶ When a girl marries at, say, 14 years old, she often must forgo an education, which means she cannot pursue more skilled work or employment that requires literacy. This traps her and most likely her children in a cycle of poverty that becomes difficult to escape without an education.