Forced marriage is a marriage in which one and/or both parties have not personally expressed their full and free consent to the union. A child marriage is considered to be a form of forced marriage, given that one and/or both parties have not expressed full, free and informed consent.
Child Bride
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Worldwide, more than 650 million women alive today were married as children. Every year, at least 12 million girls are married before they reach the age of 18. This is 28 girls every minute. One in every five girls is married, or in union, before reaching age 18. In the least developed countries, that number doubles: 40 per cent of girls are married before age 18, and 12 per cent of girls are married before age 15. The practice is particularly widespread in conflict-affected countries and humanitarian settings (source: UNICEF).
International human rights instruments and international entities stress the need to take measures to address CFM. In recent years, actions to end child and forced marriage have increased at international, regional and national levels (see A/HRC/RES/24/23; A/HRC/26/22; A/HRC/35/5; A/HRC/41/19; A/71/253; A/73/257; A/75/262). Specific efforts are under way to link these efforts to the implementation and monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly Goal 5.3 to eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilations.
No region is on track to eliminate child, early and forced marriage by 2030, as set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. To end the practice globally, progress must be significantly accelerated and sustained. Without further acceleration, more than 120 million additional girls will marry before their 18th birthday by 2030. See UNICEF Global Data
The COVID-19 pandemic is having a profound impact on the everyday lives of girls and the enjoyment of their human rights. Empirical literature and theory on the drivers of child marriage, as well as anecdotal evidence from a number of countries, allow to conclude that the risk of child marriage increases in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences. In particular, the economic impact on families and societies, school closures and interruptions in services addressed to girls, are threatening progress and putting millions of girls at risk of child marriage, as illustrated in a recent UNICEF report.
In 2014, the High Commissioner issued a report on preventing child, early and forced marriage to the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/26/22). The report looks at existing measures and strategies to prevent and eliminate child, early and forced marriage with a particular focus on challenges, achievements, best practices and implementation gaps. See submissions received on the report page.
In July 2015, the Human Rights Council adopted its first substantive resolution recognizing child and forced marriage as a human rights violation. In resolution A/HRC/RES/29/8, the Human Rights Council requested the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to organize an expert workshop to review and discuss the impact of existing strategies and initiatives to address child, early and forced marriage. See the 2017 report submitted to the Council at its thirty-fifth session (A/HRC/35/5) or visit the report page.
In its resolution (A/HRC/RES/35/16, July 2017) the Human Rights Council noted with concern that the incidence and risk of child, early and forced marriage is highly exacerbated in humanitarian settings. This is due to various factors, including poverty, insecurity, gender inequality, increased risks of sexual and gender based violence, breakdown of rule of law and state authority, and lack of access to education, among others.
The High Commissioner focused its June 2019 report submitted to the Human Rights Council A/HRC/41/19 on the issue of child, early and forced marriage in humanitarian settings. For more information, please visit the report page.
In July 2019, the Human Rights Council adopted the Resolution A/HRC/RES/41/8 on child, early and forced marriage expressing concern on prevailing impunity and lack of accountability. It requested the High Commissioner for Human Rights to organize two regional workshops on child, early and forced marriage and measures to ensure accountability at the community and national levels. The outcome of these workshops will be reflected in a report on this same topic to be presented to the Human Rights Council at its fiftieth session (June/July 2022).
Since the case was made public, a new wave of outrage against the crimes and the environment in some religious cults where such human rights violations have recurred has resulted in a national crisis. Politicians and public officials from both the governing and opposition parties condemned the abuse and called for accountability for the perpetrators. The story also raised, once again, the question of whether Islam permits child marriages or at least whether certain traditional Muslim communities believe it does.
Turkey is of course not the only country that deals with serious human right violations like child, early and forced marriage (CEFM) or child abuse. But there is a well-established pattern of chronic recurrence.
Data from the Turkish Justice Ministry show that, of the 29,822 court decisions on child sexual abuse cases in 2021, 16,161 were convictions. According to United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) data, 1 in 5 women aged between 18 and 45 in Turkey were married before the age of 18. A third of women who were married before the age of 18 became a mother while still a child, while half of the women who were married as children experienced physical violence.
Readers, at first, were outraged. As one commenter wrote on Bored Panda, "What GROWN MAN would even want to be with a 12 year old child......he's a sick bastard......this should be against the law!...."
The blog does seem to be attracting a lot of attention. In just a few days, it's become Norway's most read, and a petition against child marriage that Plan set up has already reached 186 percent of its goal. The campaign's hashtag, #stoppbryllupet, is also trending on Twitter.
Perhaps most importantly, however, readers who were initially attracted to Thea's story can direct that interest toward helping real-world girls by becoming a sponsor. The program, set up by Plan, allows sponsors to make monthly donations to children who live in countries such as El Salvador, China or Sudan, who are in danger of being married off and, unlike Thea, are very real. The sponsorships are supposed to prevent these potential marriages by replacing the savings and proceeds that families would get by selling off their daughters at a young age.
In the photos, you can see traces of the beauty my mother eventually grew into. The high cheekbones and dark blonde hair are there, but she's sickly pale. The blue eyes lack the piercing force of personality she'd later develop. Her posture is much too stiff, a byproduct of the years she spent in a body cast to correct the pronounced curvature of her spine. She was a frail child, one of ten kids born to two disabled parents. They often relied on the charity of their Catholic neighbors and nuns. There was never enough to go around.
When we think of child brides, we think of long ago and far away. My mother's arranged marriage happened in 1970 in Orange, Texas. Not that far away. Not that long ago. While far from commonplace, underage and forced marriage in the United States still occurs.
In Texas teens aged 16 and 17 can marry with a parent's permission.* Children under the age of 16 require a judge's approval to marry. According to the Department of State Health Services, there were 718 children between the ages of 15 and 17 married in Texas between 2009 and 2013, the most recent years for which data is available. One hundred and twenty of those teens were married in Harris County.
The night before the ceremony my mother sat up with her best friend and tried to plan a way out. She had a choice: marry him as my grandmother insisted, or accept the consequences. She had no money, no way of getting a job, nowhere to go. She had been wild, a problem child, but she still did as her mother told her to do. At certain ages, parental permission looks more like coercion. There are a lot of tears at an 8th grade girl's bachelorette party.
It's not easy to find statistics on how many child brides are forced to marry in the United States. A national non-profit that seeks to help victims called the Tahirih Justice Center was able to document 3,000 cases of forced marriage across the nation in a two-year timeframe. Since the report's release in 2011, the advocacy group has seen an upsurge in the number of women seeking help to get out of these relationships. The center, which seeks to raise awareness and influence legislation, expects more to come forward as the problem is recognized as an issue.
Another agency, Unchained at Last, has uncovered thousands of cases of underage marriage in New Jersey. More than 175 of the marriages involved children less than 15 years old. In Virginia, which has marriage laws similar to Texas's, a study found 4,500 children were married between 2004 and 2013. Ninety percent of them were girls and 90 percent of the time they married adults. Many of these marriages were between partners whose ages would trigger statutory rape laws. Marriage provides a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for perpetrators, while doing nothing to protect the girls.
"It's shocking. It's definitely shocking to advocates who are just now looking into this issue," says Casey Swegman, project manager for Tahirih's forced marriage initiative. "We don't know why a judge wouldn't stop and think maybe this isn't in the child's best interest. Maybe they don't feel empowered to say no or reject the petition."
* Editor's Note: On June 15, Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill banning child marriage in Texas. The bill goes into effect September 1. The bill's passage was made possible through the testimony of former child brides in Texas and with the help of Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, Sen. Van Taylor, R-Collin and the Tahirih Justice Center. You can read more about the bill and how it came to pass here. 2ff7e9595c
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