When reflecting on the values that hold our civilisation together, few would seem to be more unifying than the desire to protect children from sexual exploitation. Cracks in that unity emerge, however, when the legal sanction of marriage comes into play. There is currently intense political debate in Iraq over the prospect of the age of consent to marriage being lowered – but that’s not the only country in which children face this kind of risk, and some of them might surprise you.
The conflict in Iraq is currently centred on efforts to revise the country’s Personal Status Law (enacted in 1959), which ensures equality between men and women in areas such as inheritance and divorce. If successful, they could also result in the age at which it is legal to marry being dropped from 18 to 15 for boys and, for girls, just nine. The proposed amendments were denied a second reading on 2 September, but the chances are it will be back, despite having the support of only a quarter of the population.
Marriage ages around the world
Across most of the world, the age of marriage is somewhere between 16 and 18, with the 1962 UN Convention on Consent to Marriage setting it at 18. Some Asian countries, including China, set it a few years higher. The countries where it is considerably lower also tend to be those with the most significant economic disadvantage, like Sudan and the Central African Republic, but religion can also be a factor.
Iran allows girls to be married at 13, as long as their parents consent to it. In practice, the parents are usually the ones brokering such marriages. In Afghanistan, both these factors are present, and although state law says the legal age is 18, this is frequently ignored by local municipal and religious jurisdictions, with over half of girls married off by the age of 16.
The elephant in the room is the US, where the federal age of consent to sex, set at 18, is overridden by marriage laws which vary by state. In Mississippi, Oklahoma, New Mexico and California, there is no age of consent, while in Missouri, which recently raised it from 14 to 16, Republican state senator, Mike Moon, had argued that it should be lowered to 12. He has the backing of a substantial part of his party, which holds that when children get pregnant, it’s better for them to be married and that preventing them from marrying makes them more likely to have abortions.
The physical dangers of child marriage
The pregnancy issue is a pertinent one, but perhaps not in the way this suggests. Being able to become pregnant does not mean being able to safely carry a pregnancy to term, and pregnancies early in life carry a significantly higher mortality rate, along with the potential to cause lasting physiological damage. Motherhood also interferes with education, so girls are frequently left with no qualifications, damaging their life prospects and adding to their vulnerability.
Whichever country you look at, it is mostly girls who marry young, and their husbands are always older – sometimes by decades. This tends to originate with the belief that men should be in a position to provide financial support for wives and children before they marry, but it also has a more sinister side. In recent years, several women have spoken out about being married off as children, to men who raped or abused them, as a way to cover it up and avoid scandal.
This highlights the other major risk associated with a low age of marriage: in most jurisdictions, once it has happened, it’s very hard for children to escape. That’s because the spouse takes over the role of legal guardian of the child. This usually makes it impossible for the child to initiate divorce. The spouse often controls access to medical treatment, making it easy to hide abuse, and police may even return children who run away from their abusers because they are the people who have legal custody of them.
Marriage law in Scotland
In Scotland, marriage is legal at 16, in line with the age of consent for sex. The fact that Scotland grants other forms of legal empowerment to 16-year-olds under specific circumstances means that spouses are on a more equal footing.
This age limit was only established in 1929; before then, girls could marry at 12 and boys at 14. There are concerns that it correlates with higher rates of domestic abuse and mental illness, but it’s hard to tell if it’s marriage itself that it responsible for this, or cohabitation, and there is concern that raising the age in line with the UN convention could result in more such relationships going under the radar, making it harder for social services to identify those who may be at risk.
While it remains to be seen what will happen in Iraq – and the US has become an outspoken critic of the proposed changes, despite failing to take federal action at home – what we do know is that empowering and educating girls is the single most significant way to increase economic prosperity and reduce climate damage in any country or region.
Ending child marriage, or at least limiting it to emancipated 16 and 17-year-olds, would protect some of the world’s most vulnerable people, and it would also have wider beneficial effects for all of us. Despite this, however, it remains low on the international political agenda. It’s time for that to change.
Moren in human rights.
