World Vision calls on the Prime Minister for an end to Child Marriage

World Vision calls on the Prime Minister to use his influence at the up-coming Commonwealth gathering in Sri Lanka to press for an end to child marriage. 

David Cameron is due to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting next month and many of his fellow delegates will represent countries where child marriage is a grave problem. Based on current trends, 142 million girls will be married in the decade to 2020.

David Thomson, Head of Policy at World Vision UK, said: “The British government has rightly been outspoken about the growing problem of violence against women in conflict.

“Being married before your eighteenth birthday, often to someone very much older, is another form of violence.”

As the world marks the International Day of the Girl today, we must ensure that measures to tackle early marriage are at the forefront.

Early marriage is a global problem. It cuts across countries, cultures, religions and ethnicities. World Vision UK’s report ‘Untying the Knot: Exploring Early Marriage in Fragile States’  analyses the links between fragility and early marriage, highlighting the role that humanitarian emergencies play in forcing parents to choose early marriage as a perceived means of ‘protecting’ their daughters.

Evidence shows that education plays a key role in delaying the age of marriage for a girl. Our research found that, in fragile and emergency environments where parents genuinely consider early marriage to be the best available means of protecting their daughters, access to safe education is often the only feasible alternative. Specifically, we found that: 

• Early marriage is used by families living in conflict-affected areas to protect their daughters. Girl children in fragile and insecure environments often marry at the point at which they can no longer access safe education. In Niger and Somaliland, this was predominantly at the end of primary school when girls were between the ages of 10-15.
   
• Our research shows how important it is that girls aged between 12 and 14 have access to safe education. 

Early marriage results in lower levels of education and economic status of girls and women. For many girls, their inability to access secondary school means the start of marriage, often because their parents are afraid for their daughter’s safety if they are neither attending school nor kept busy in the marital home. Many factors contribute to a access to secondary education for girl’s, including completing primary school exams, the travel distance to the nearest secondary school, and the threat of sexual violence both en route to school.

Anxiety and fear surrounding the sexual security of girls means that girls who are not in school are more likely to be pushed into marriage to safeguard them against ‘immoral’ behaviour, where premarital sex is associated with significant shame. 

“You will be insulted as a girl if you are not in school and you are not married. People will think you have a bad character.” (16 year old girl, Niger) 

In Somaliland, parents and girls spoke of the threat of rape and sexual violence, heightened by the insecurity of drought and food scarcity. This was a particular risk for girls walking to and from school. Many of the girls we spoke to told us that their families had been forced to move out of the village to better grazing ground as a result of the drought. 

This meant that they were no longer able to walk to school with their friends, and many girls were withdrawn from school to safeguard them from the threat of sexual violence.