Ending Child Marriage

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Every year, 12 million girls are married before the age of 18, according to data from the UN. That breaks down to 23 girls getting married every minute. Child marriage is a violation of girls' human rights and can have severe, lifelong physical, mental, emotional and financial consequences. It leaves young girls particularly vulnerable to rape, maternal and child mortality, and gender based violence. It also often forces girls to put aside their education, potential, and empowerment for a limited future. We sit down with Gayatri Patel and Nidal Karim from CARE USA to talk about child marriage. 

Child marriage is an umbrella term that covers child, early and forced marriage. Child marriage refers to a marriage or an informal union in which one of the marrying parties is a child under 18. Early marriage refers to a marriage or informal union that involves a person under 18 marrying in countries where the age of majority is attained earlier, or upon marriage or informal union where both spouses are 18 or older but there are factors that make them not ready to consent to marriage, or a lack of information regarding the person’s life option. Forced marriage refers to a marriage or informal union completed without the informed consent of one or both parties or where one or both parties is unable to end or leave the marriage or union. 

Child, early and forced marriage is found around the world and is not limited to one religion or region. Although the reasoning behind participating in child marriage varies from community to community, there are often underlying themes that stretch across communities, countries, and societies. These include undervaluing girls, restricting them to gendered roles like domestic or reproductive roles, perpetuating patriarchal control over adolescent sexuality, and gender-based violence or fear of gender-based violence, as well as the commodification of girls in the marital exchange. 

The harms we see from child marriage are numerous. First and foremost, a children do not have the ability to consent, and entering a marriage often and unfortunately results in rape. There are lifelong physical, psychological, and emotional consequences to child marriage. Child brides have significantly higher rates of having children at young ages, and they suffer complications in pregnancy and childbirth. Child brides also have higher rates of HIV/AIDS contraction. Girls facing child marriage often end up leaving school and living in inter-generational poverty, and they are more likely to experience intimate-partner violence. The consequences of child marriage affects the girl, extends to her children, her household, and her community as a whole. 

Child marriage is deeply rooted around girls’ sexuality, including fear of girls’ sexuality and control of girls’ sexuality. That makes it a sexual and reproductive health issue. Everything from comprehensive sex education to access to SRHR services are critical pieces of the fight against child marriage. 

There is no silver bullet to end child marriage, but there are critical characteristics on how to approach the issue. Putting the girls at the center of the approach, involving parents and communities, and engaging men and boys in the conversation are vital approaches when talking about child marriage and its consequences. 

Links from this episode

CARE on Twitter
CARE on Facebook
CARE's Information on Child Marriage
CARE Report
S. 1171, The Keeping Girls in School Act

Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back a podcast on all things repro. I'm your host Jennie Wetter. In each episode, I'll be taking you to the front lines of the escalating fight over our sexual and reproductive health and rights at home and abroad. Each episode, I will be speaking with leaders who are fighting to protect our reproductive health and rights to ensure that no one's reproductive health depends on where they live. It's time for repros to fight back.

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Jennie: Welcome to this week's episode of rePROs Fight Back. I'm really excited to have two amazing advocates with me to talk about child marriage. First we have Gayatri Patel with CARE. Uh, she's also a co-chair of Girls Not Brides U.S., and I also have Nidal Karim who is with CARE as well, um, and is in charge of their Tipping Point program. Welcome ladies.

Nidal: Thank you. Excited to be here.

Gayatri: Hi. Hey.

Jennie: Okay. So since we're gonna talk about child marriage, I think it's a really important place to start. What is child marriage? What do we mean when we say child marriage?

Nidal: So I'm going to give a very technical definition because um, it's a fraud term. Yeah. Um, so we usually hear about child marriage. The term, the more kind of comprehensive term that we typically use is child early and forced marriage. Um, because it is, uh, a broader expansive definition. Um, when we talk about child marriage, it is specifically where at least one of the parties is a child and according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child that is under 18. At the same time we also talk about early marriages, which are marriages that involve a person age below 18 in countries where the age of majority is attained earlier or upon marriage or marriages where both spouses are 18 or older. But there are other factors that make them not ready to consent to marriage, um, such as their level of physical, emotional, sexual and psychosocial development or a lack of information regarding the person's life options. And then we have the concept of forced marriage, which is any marriage which occurs without the full and free consent of one or both parties and our where one or both parties is unable to end or leave the marriage, including as a result of terrorists or intense social or family pressure. So while we, you know, in short, often you'll hear child marriage, but we're really talking about something that is a little bit more expansive than that.

Jennie: So you touched this a little bit, that looks different. Let's talk a little bit about what it looks like around the world because it is different in different places.

Nidal: Uh, in terms of the data on child marriage, the data is specifically on how I define child marriage, which is marriage under the age of 18. Um, and the latest data which came out a few months ago, uh, from the UN has estimates of about 12 million girls per year who are married before the age of 18. At the same time when we kind of think about what does it look like around the world, child early enforced marriage is found in all religions and regions. We typically think of it as, oh, it only happens in certain parts of the world and that is not the case. It's a phenomena that is not part of any single culture. The way that it is practice and explanations that are given for it vary from one community to another. But the underlying causes are often similar. You know, when we look at it, there are these common themes around undervaluing girls, restricting them to specific kinds of gendered roles which are domestic or reproductive roles, there is also patriarchal control over adolescent sexuality that plays out across societies, countries, regions… Also looking at aspects of gender based violence and fear of gender based violence- that also works as a driver. And then finally there is a piece which is like the commodification of girls in the marital exchange. So yeah, how it looks across the world. Again, like there are context specific ways it shows up, but there are some underlying pieces that you know, we see as being pretty common across the board.

Jennie: And you're touching on a couple of things that are really important. I think, you know, historically the argument has been it's a cultural practice and so we shouldn't be involved in changing people's culture. And the other one that you really hear is that it's the religion. And so I think it's really important, which you point out is that it doesn't really seem to matter.

Nidal:Yeah. And I mean, interestingly, you know, for our project we work specifically in Nepal and Bangladesh. And one of the interesting things we saw that popped up when we were doing our context analysis was in Bangladesh, it's Muslim majority. Um, but we do have Hindu communities where we work. In Nepal, where we work, it is Hindu majority and then you have Muslim communities there. And when we did the context analysis, it was so interesting because in Bangladesh they were using religion as a factor. And in Nepal, they were using religion as a factor and the minority communities actually had lower rates. And so it was like, wait, so the Muslim communities in Nepal actually had lower rates and in Bangladesh the Hindu communities had lower rates. So in a lot of ways that exemplified that, you know, how much of this is really about religion

Jennie: Since we're talking about ways to end child marriage, I think it's important to understand why that's important. So what are some of the harms we from child marriage?

Nidal: So you know, when people talk about the issue, the first thing they usually talk about is maternal mortality and child mortality. That's like where everyone's head goes. But what I like to really focus in on is like, just thinking about a girl who is married off at a young age with no choice around the issue. And also just being explicit that 90% of the time that means that they're going to experience rape. And that is not something that's talked about you know, kind of more openly. And then just really thinking about lifelong consequences, whether that's physical, emotional, um, they're kind of around material financial, um, pieces and psychological wellbeing of that girl. At the same time, you know, when you look at the research, child brides have significant risk of having children at younger ages. They do suffer complications with pregnancy and childbirth. They usually have higher rates of HIV/AIDS contraction. So there's those pieces, but we also see, they're also leaving school. They tend to live in poverty. That ends up being intergenerational, then their peers who marry at a later age. they're also more likely to experience intimate partner violence. The other piece of it is that, you know, the issue reaches beyond the girl herself. So at the end of the day, we see that extending into her children, her household, and her community as a whole. So in a way, it's just kind of curtailing the potential of a young girl. And then all of that is lost because the opportunities have kind of been cut short.

Jennie: Really thinking about what the girl and her future, she just doesn't have the chance to become empowered to make decisions. Um, especially if she, it gets cut off from education.

Nidal: There are places where you see girls who do get married and are still able to continue their education, but that is few and far between. And so I think the norm is that most of the time they're not being able to pursue an education. And often times, at least where we work, we've seen, it's also not that they're able to engage in livelihood opportunities until they're older. And oftentimes when, when you have brides were brought in at a younger age, they’re seen as a source for um, labor in the household. And so it is kind of also an isolating space. You come into a household and, and you're really kind of limited to domestic and, and childcare chores.

Jennie: Um, so this is a podcast that talks about sexual and reproductive health and rights, which we'll probably call SRHR for short from here on out. But that's what that means when we'd say that later. And so some people may wonder why I'm spending a podcast talking about child marriage. So you want to maybe talk about why child marriage is an SRHR issue?

Nidal: Typically the answer you'll get is, well, it's a maternal health issue, so therefore it is an SRHR issue. What we like to really front with is we see child marriage deeply rooted around girl’s sexuality, fear of girl’s sexuality, control of girl’s sexuality, which is an SRHR issue. Um, and so to us, you know, everything from comprehensive sexuality education to access to SRHR services and information are critical pieces that play into this practice. SRHR is like one of the core pieces of, uh, what is a driver as well as what can be a solution for this issue.

Jennie: What can we do? How can we, um, work on ending child marriage? It's real simple answer like one sentence, right?

Nidal: Like most complex issues. It's not like there's a silver bullet. I think there's, uh, a hunger for a simple solution, um, for a long time that was, “oh, education!” Like, if we just provide education, this will go away. But I think more and more, there is consensus among all of us who are doing this work that this is a complicated issue. It does have context specific things that we have to pay attention to. And I think one of the core things is I think there's slowly more and more learning and research that is showing that there are some critical characteristics of how we approach it. So one that is… I think most of us are in agreement is having girl centered approaches. Like whatever we're doing, the girls have to be at the center of it. Another core thing again is though it can't be just about the girls. We can't expect them to be the ones who are going to change this. So another core approach piece is really involving parents and communities. Um, and that is really important. A third key piece I would say is engaging men and boys. I think there's also a lot of consensus that this is not just about the girls. Who is creating the demand for this? And also in a lot of places, fathers play a huge role in this decision making. So engaging men and boys is a critical part. There's several more pieces, but the last piece I would speak to is we feel like there is something very important about the collectivization of girls and finding ways to drive this change for girls to gather, to come together and be able to be part of this movement.

Jennie: Yeah, I think it's really great. We talked about the thinking about the whole of the girl. I think often particularly with like funding silos, you could get so many things that are like, let's focus on education and then sanitation, and health and then sexual health and all these things are different. And so often then you don't see, well, let's think about the girl and her life and think of it as a holistic person. Her, sorry. Think of her as a holistic person instead of thinking about all of the various pieces.

Nidal: Yeah. And I mean I think, um, at the, at the Chan B meeting Chandra said it so well like girls are not where it's like Monday I need school and Tuesday I need…I mean they're holistic beings and what we bring in as programming needs to address things in a holistic way. Um, one thing I would add to in, in the approach piece is where we've really been trying to explore and invest as CARE but also others are, is the piece around social norms. And I think one of the big lessons has been that often, in many places you have families who, their personal thinking is that they don't agree with it, but that there is there's a normative expectation. They think that others expect them or that there will be sanctions if they don't do what is expected of them. And so I think that's another kind of core area for child marriage programming that is being explored that I think there's a lot of promising work in it but it’s a much more newer area of work. Um, but definitely promising.

Jennie: Yeah, I was going to say, I feel like I've not really heard that as much in the child marriage space versus I've heard it more in the FGM space.

Nidal: When I think about the work that’s done on FGM, like the, I feel like they did some really kind of groundbreaking work around norms and now more of that conversation is happening in the child marriage space and also in the adolescent sexual reproductive health and rights space. I think this is a moment that we're in where there's more and more kind of thoughtfulness and investment to think about how does change happen and what is this key piece that we weren't paying attention to and we need to, um, and that we're, you know, there's several of us that, you know, in our project we've explored it specifically to look at how do we do norms change and how do we kind of design, programming informing it using like principles from the theory around like social norms change.

Jennie: Maybe we went on, talk a little bit about, uh, what CARE is doing around child marriage?

Nidal: Um, great question. So we actually just recently released a report about CARE’s global work on child early enforced marriage. And we're working across several countries and our work looks different in different places. There are some places where we have, you know, standalone programming such as Tipping Point, which, you know, the project that I'm involved with is…it's focused on the issue, but a lot of our work happens where it's integrated into gender based violence programming, into girls education programming, into economic empowerment work. So it shows up in many different ways. What the report does is it lays out some of our kind of core approaches and it includes some of the things I mentioned to you, such as social norms, engaging men and boys, and working with governments and a big piece I think beyond our programming in country, um, one of the other big things that care does is advocacy which, Gayatri will speak to more, but we do quite a bit also around advocacy and global spaces, but even with national governments and national spaces, because you need to kind of have the inner linkage of what you're doing in programming, but taking that learning and actually being able to feed it up to policy makers and funders and so on.

Jennie: Well, I think that leads us perfectly into policy. So, uh, Gayatri we will change over to you…what is the U.S. doing around child marriage?

Gayatri : I mean, I think we need to start with what can the U.S. government be doing?

Jennei: Yeah, absolutely.

Gayatri: As the U.S government as it a leader purportedly in, in this space, um, we really look to the U.S. government to build child marriage and gender equality into its foreign policy work. So what are the U.S. diplomats saying on the ground? What are our USAID missions saying on the ground when they're working in these countries with high prevalence of child marriage? And then secondly, we look to the U.S. government to fund interventions and programs that work on child marriage and gender equality around the world. So with that in mind, we, we really do refer back to this whole of government approach and whole of girl approach. And so Girls Not Brides USA and CARE USA have put a lot of energy into making sure that what the U.S government does to end child marriage is really substantive and driven by evidence and fact and really can, can have an impact on the ground. So in 2016 after a lot of really sustained advocacy and it really was a labor of love by civil society organizations, the U.S. government launched what they call the “U.S. global strategy to empower adolescent girls”. And this was really a key moment in policy when it came to empowering adolescent girls because it, it looked at the girl holistically, like how Nidal was saying, it talked about is that goals and objectives and, and strategies for how to look at girls education, how to look at girls and reproductive health, how to build comprehensive sexuality education into the work that the U.S. government is doing overseas. And really importantly linked all of that to ending child marriage. And so it was really critical to have that, that whole of government, whole of girl strategy. And it really implicates the work of, at least for us, government agencies… the State Department, the USAID, um, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Peace Corps. And I guess the next step of it was to, to make sure that it was implemented, make sure that it was something that the U.S. government really integrates into its work and really implements and has the resources to do that. So more recently, GNB USA and CARE has been focusing on Congress and what Congress can do to shore up the strategy. So we've asked for foreign assistance allocations for the implementation of it. We've asked for legislation that would make it a plan that the U.S. administration has to implement. Um, so that's where our energy is right now.

Jennie: With a lot of our conversations, we usually see a big change between what, so the girls' strategy was under the Obama administration and then things changing under the Trump administration. Has child marriage seen a similar shift in prioritization?

Gayatri: It depends on who you ask. I mean, the agencies that are really involved in implementing the strategy, particularly the State Department and USAID, they're thinking and what they say is that they are still implementing it, that they're, they're really working on socializing it amongst their staff and making sure that everyone knows that the strategy exists and knows that they have a responsibility to implement it. What we're seeing at the administration wide level is that there isn't as much emphasis on what they consider niche issues like adolescent girls or gender or quality. Um, what we are seeing that there's emphasis on women's economic empowerment and so we've taken the tactic of, you know, if, if that's an issue that this administration doesn't want to work on, they really need to be aware that you can't get to, you know, genuine women's economic empowerment if you still have 12 million girls a year who are being married and who are, who are not achieving an education, who are not entering the workforce, who don't have economic opportunities because they're at home taking care of household chores and taking on unpaid care burdens. We're trying to get the message across that there is still a really strong need for the U.S. government to play a policy role and a leadership role on empowering adolescent girls. And if they, if they want to do, if they want initiatives like women's economic empowerment, they have to create an enabling environment to do that. So, yeah, I mean I think we also need to take into account the global gag rule, also known as Mexico City Policy and the impact it has on child marriage and adolescent girls. For those who don't know about the policy or as familiar with it, it's a policy that's gone back and forth between administrations. But this administration has re-instituted it. And it basically says that the U.S. government can't provide funding to organizations that provide or promote abortion services. But what's dangerous is that this administration has expanded it even further to apply to all global health funds. So any funding that the U.S. government gives on any health issue overseas cannot be an organization that provides or promotes abortion. Um, whether it's related to this funding or not. And so what strikes me about this and what's particularly concerning about this is that it really narrows girl’s ability to access the services and the information they need to live healthy lives and to make choices for themselves on if and how many children to have. So it, you know, it's something from policy perspective that we really need to think about and, and critically push back against because it, it, it is something that impacts the work that we're doing on ending child marriage.

Jennie: Yeah. I think it's important to think about, you know, who's losing out on the money. You know, a lot of the groups that are providing youth friendly services that um, these young women would be able to, will be wanting to access or even comprehensive sexuality education are often groups that may have, um, been advocating for abortion or had been funding abortion with their non U.S. money in the past and now they're no longer going to be able to get U.S. funding and may not be able to provide all the services they were in the past.

Gayatri: Or even just providing information about abortion. I mean it's, it's such a broadly applied rule and it, it has such a ripple effect on, on how it's impacting things. But I think in, in this whole narrative, what concerns me, maybe not the most, cause there are so many things that concern me, but what's particularly concerning is that girls aren't getting access to information. It's not even just services. It's, it's straight out information on how their bodies work, what their options are. What we are hearing today in, in the Girls Not Brides conference, is that comprehensive sexuality education is, is not just about body parts, but it's also about healthy relationships and how to negotiate safety within relationships. And so there's so much, so much impact on gender based violence and like, Nidal was saying intimate partner violence within marriages that could be averted with comprehensive sexuality education except for the fact that a lot of the organizations who are doing that type of education can't receive funding to do it anymore. And so it's, it's really something that concerns me from a policy angle, but also from a service delivery angle.

Jennie: Absolutely. Um, and if you want to learn more about the global gag rule, um, you can check out episode five where I talk to your Bierne-Roose Snyder at the Center for Health and Gender Equity and we do a deep dive in the global gag rule so you can check out more there. So now that people know a little bit about what's going on around child marriage and what has been happening in the U.S. government, uh, what can people do now that they care?

Gayatri: One thing I always tell advocates and people who are interested is call your member of Congress! Tell them that this is an issue that's important to you. There's an immediate and urgent and ever green need for foreign assistance funding. And right now it's incredibly at risk. There's, you know, the Trump administration has threatened to pull all foreign assistance, which would include any assistance that goes towards programs, um, geared towards empowering adolescent girls or ending child marriage. So we really need to send the message to Congress that they hold the purse strings. They should really be putting their, their power and their energy and their voice behind funding a really strong foreign assistance budget, including programs for child, marriage and gender and gender and equality. But there are also legislative options. I mean there's, there's a bill called the Keeping Girls in School Act that goes along way and talking about the barriers to girls education, including things like what Nidal talked about, the, the social norms that are holding girls back. Um, the sexual harassment and the SRHR challenges that are keeping girls from actually accessing education and other opportunities. And so that's a bill that, that we want to see a lot of support for. It's introduced in the Senate. It's hopefully going to be introduced in the house with bipartisan support very soon. Um, and we really want to see Congress take a strong statement that adolescent girls are a population of concern that the U.S. really cares about.

Jennie: Thank you so much for being here. Gayatri and Nidal, I had a great time.

Jennie: Thanks for listening everyone. And we'll see you on our next episode of repros fight back. For more information, including show notes from this episode and previous episodes, please visit our website at reprosfightback.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter at repros fight back. If you like our show, please help others find it by sharing it with your friends and subscribing, rating and reviewing us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

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