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Child brides

For poorer, most of the time

Feb 28th 2011, 14:09 by The Economist online

In some parts of the world marrying young is a social norm

IN SOUTH Asia and sub-Saharan Africa 38% of women marry before they are 18 years old. Child marriages, as defined by UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency, are those undertaken by women under the age of 18 and include unions where a woman and a man live together as if they were married. According to a UNICEF report, most child marriages take place between the ages of 15 and 18, but in three countries, Niger, Chad and Bangladesh, more than a third of women aged 20-24 were already married by the age of 15. Such practices often flout the law: whilst the legal age of marriage in India is 18 around half of the Indian women surveyed were already married by that age. One negative effect of early marriage is the exclusion of women from education in favour of domestic work and child rearing. So countries with a high prevalence of child marriages also tend to have low literacy rates for young women.

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Martian2008 wrote:
Feb 28th 2011 2:43 GMT

Just for comparison purpose:

What is percentage of pre-18 girls who engage in regular consensual sexual relationship in Europe and North America? And what is percentage of pre-18 mothers in their age group?

Are problems faced by pre-18 mothers similar in Africa/South Asia and Europe/North America?

How married pre-18 girls in poor countries are different from pre-18 mothers in rich countries?

Feb 28th 2011 3:13 GMT

@Martian2008

Best estimate in the UK for sexually active 15-18 year olds seems to be 20-25%.

Pregancy rate is approx 4%, of which half were terminated, some of these may be married.

Not sure what you mean about how they are different? I'd guess that in the main the western mothers are far more fortunate but I'd imagine the mothers were similar, caring and scared.

I believe the UK (or US) is the worst in the west.

Feb 28th 2011 3:30 GMT

The US is the worst in the west, the UK is the worst in europe. In relation to problems for underage mothers im sure they are similar in a bssic sense, but doubt the direct relation between motherhood and illiteracy (and lack of access to education in general) exists as strongly in more developed nations.

Feb 28th 2011 3:32 GMT

Hmmm how "reliable" is this survey? The reason I ask is because Pakistan, which has a much lower literacy rate for women (59% from chart) compared to literacy rates in India and Bangladesh (about 75% each from chart) and where the "women's rights" with the current Islamization/Talibanization are nothing to write home about either, somehow has a much lower proportion of "child brides". Doesn't seem to square up unless I am missing something.

Sherbrooke wrote:
Feb 28th 2011 5:18 GMT

From the looks of these chart, early marriages don't seem to be a problem with Islam, as the media of late lead us to believe. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most African countries on this list are actually Christian.

Feb 28th 2011 5:23 GMT

Could it be that many Pakistani brides are married to expats/recent emigrants and as a consequence have to be older? There appears to be some kind of "export" of wives to the UK to ethnically Pakistani British citizens. I've no idea how significant the numbers are though.

D. Sherman wrote:
Feb 28th 2011 5:37 GMT

The assumption here is that getting married at a young age is automatically a bad thing. In the modern Western world, perhaps it is, and so we wag our fingers at those in "backwards" countries who still do it. In medieval Europe, when only the Church performed marriages, the girls could marry at age 12 and boys at 13. Boys also generally went to war at 15. In much of the US, marriage at age 16 is still legal. In some places the lower limit is 14. Up until perhaps 50 years ago, especially in remote rural areas, marriage in the mid-teens was common.

I submit that marriage at a young age has been widely practiced and widely accepted because it has been found to be socially successful for several reasons. The first and simplest is that when life is likely to be sort, one needs to get started on the adult part of it early. More importantly, in such cultures it's very difficult to get by as a single man, and even harder as a single woman. Social networks are vital and that's all about family. Marriage at a young age provides additional family support, both of one's own family and from the in-laws, which is vital in many cultures.

Marriage has evolved into a lot of different things over the years. In Europe, governments usurped the institution from the Church and gave it legal footing. Somewhere along the line it became a license to have sex, with criminal punishments for sex outside of government-licensed marriage. More recently, with fornication and adultery laws unenforced (though still on the books), but with little stigma attached to what used to be called "shacking up" and "illegitimate children", it's become more of a business contract. To a people for whom a marriage license is a business contract, people who are too young to sign a contract should not marry. However to people for whom marriage is all about family connections in the community, being unmarried is like being an exile or a stranger, and the benefits of maintaining tight community bonds outweigh the restrictions of being "stuck" with someone you might not have chosen if you'd waited until you were 30 and dated a lot of people before you picked the ideal one.

Perhaps, as with lots of cultural institutions, "under-age" marriage in the countries listed is going to come into irreconcilable conflict with modern western views of personal independence. Perhaps it will be seen as unnecessary when the government provides much of what family and community used to provide and what is now termed the "social safety net". The opposite pole is clearly seen in all the American "children" who are still living with their parents and playing video games all the time at an age where people in less prosperous parts of the world would be grandparents.

There are certainly disadvantages to getting married as a teenager, but there are also advantages. A survey like this, measuring rates of under-age marriage as if they were rates of tuberculosis or illiteracy, ignores that likelihood that if a lot of people have been doing something a certain way for a long time, there's probably a good reason for it.

Wayne Bernard wrote:
Feb 28th 2011 5:49 GMT

Here's an article outlining one of the physiological issues facing child brides in Niger and how it is difficult to force our western views across a cultural divide:

http://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2010/06/stephen-harper-thinks-he-kn...

turtledawn wrote:
Feb 28th 2011 7:01 GMT

A significant effect of child marriage, and especially for those in poor countries, is that young motherhood is extremely dangerous and there is often no to very little healthcare available for these girls. Even if there is a hospital nearby, and it happens to have medicines, blood for transfusions, and sutures available, the girls themselves are often so little valued that their families won't take them there, leaving them to die of septic miscarriage and hemorrhage. And let's not forget fistulas from obstructed labor, either.

F1scalHawk wrote:
Feb 28th 2011 7:49 GMT

There is a lot of tradition, religion, and prejudice on setting the age for marriage. But little science.

Feb 28th 2011 7:55 GMT

I think some of the commenters are missing the point of the article.

How does this differ from teen moms in the West? There is a low literacy rate overall for girls in countries with child marriages, as opposed to what may be a low literacy rate for a particular subsection in the West. (I don't have education stats for teen mothers handy, but I do know that Western countries don't have low literacy rates overall for girls.) I do know that there have been studies that show that women who are educated tend to improve the economics of the entire community.

A rather HUGE disadvantage to young marriage not mentioned in this article is the fact that pregnancy, particularly in developing nations, is dangerous for women in general, and the risk skyrockets if you have a child under a certain age. I would imagine young marriage also tends to lead to young pregnancies. As another poster mentioned, even if these pregnancies don't result in death, they can have other serious consequences.

cornerman wrote:
Feb 28th 2011 7:55 GMT

D. Sherman, in trying to make your defense of traditions as eloquent as possible, you somehow did not read the last sentence of the article, "One negative effect of early marriage is the exclusion of women from education in favour of domestic work and child rearing. So countries with a high prevalence of child marriages also tend to have low literacy rates for young women." Adding to that are the terrible health complications of early sexual relations (most of the time forced) and pregnancy at a young age.

Just because a tradition exists, it doesn't mean it is right and it has to stay that way. Somehow, we in the West, figured that out and decided to change those same traditions, why not give those options to others in the world?? Go to Bangladesh and ask any young girl married to a man 30-40 years her elder whether she would prefer being a wife at 12 or finish high school and be a wife at 18. A number of studies have proven that education of girls and women is key to solving problems such as population boom and children's health. Your presumption is quite preposterous and it scares me that there are people who think this way.

Feb 28th 2011 8:16 GMT

Life expectancy and birth rate/population growth rate would be interesting comparative figures.

BailoutNation wrote:
Feb 28th 2011 10:43 GMT

The ghettos in the US are not much better, if you count teenage pregnancy as "child bride". At the end of the day, it's the same story everywhere - uneducated mothers raise ignorant stupid kids, and the toxic cycle continues.

happyfish18 wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 12:25 GMT

It seems these countries also tend to have more violent crimes against women even though most of their male population are freely able to rape the young girls.

robyn b wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 12:52 GMT

Sherbrooke, the countries are not uniformly Christian although there may be Christians in the majority of some. Although calling themselves Christian they still embrace traditional culture , which usually means early marriage so parents can control who they marry. Some Muslim countries eg Pakistan disallow marriage before 16 but many underage marriages (around the age of 12) secretly take place so official figures have to be taken with a grain of salt.The legal age of consent in quite a few Muslim countries is around 12 (One at 9) to allow early marriage.

D. Sherman wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 1:08 GMT

cornerman, you won't find a bigger supporter of public education in general, and education of poor women in particular, than me. In "developing" countries, women's education has probably done more than any other single factor to improve society and reduce the birth rate. If you want to approach teenage marriage by improving access to education, there will be lots of other good side-effects as well.

My point in the historical and cultural background is that the modern situation in which people stay in school until they're perhaps 20, maybe marry and maybe not, maybe have children in or out of wedlock, or maybe not, is quite different from how people have usually lived. There are lots of good things about modern society that are different from traditional lifestyles, but I think we'd do well to recognize what radical changes they represent, and also to consider that the traditional methods didn't become traditional without good reasons. Perhaps some of those reasons are no longer valid, but perhaps some of them are.

The underlying theme here is that where family and community are vital to survival, that usually means that early marriage is equally vital. Marriage in such a culture provides a lot of things that we expect government and jobs to provide nowadays. It's unreasonable to yank people away from their traditions and expect them to suddenly replace them with western norms without any time to get used to the idea and see that the new system can be relied upon.

I feel for people who are on living on the edge of the "modern" world, trying to navigate a safe path between what they see on TV and what their grandparents tell them. Never before in human history have so many people had to change their culture so quickly. All I'm calling for is a little respect and compassion and a little less of the typical western arrogance towards "primitive" cultures. We know some things, but we don't know everything.

atashi wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 1:27 GMT

"The ghettos in the US are not much better, if you count teenage pregnancy as "child bride"."

These are muchly teen girl having consensual sex with teen boys, while the "child bride" is more likely to be marry to a friend of her father regardless of her wish. Especially among the below 15 years old category.

Bravado wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 1:58 GMT

@Sherbrooke

You are very wrong. Looking at the top 10:

1, 2, 3, 4, 6 & 7 are majority Muslim. Nepal and India at 5th and 8th are mostly Hindu. Uganda and Zambia at 9th and 10th have a Christian majority.

XinXing wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 3:06 GMT

Life expectancy at birth for these country is 53-54 yo. For the US and UK is 78 and 80. I can only see that the call of nature would required these people to reproduce earlier... : )
Whether higher literacy rates result in later marriage age is more of chicken and egg situation, which actually come first... I can understand financially independent women may not even want to get married.

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