Girls Should Not Be Wives

Every minute, 23 girls around the world are married, according to Girls Not Brides, a coalition of more than 1,000 organisations across 100 countries.

No child should be married. Girls are far more likely to be affected than boys, accounting for nine in ten of those wed before 18, and their husbands are frequently much older men.

What follows

The consequences extend well beyond the immediate threat of sexual violence.

Education ends, almost universally and almost immediately. Poverty risk rises, because a girl removed from school at 15 has forfeited the earnings of an entire working life. Domestic abuse is more common. Health outcomes are worse, including high rates of maternal mortality — a girl whose body has not finished developing bearing children is a medical risk category, not a moral abstraction.

Each of these compounds the others, and each is transmitted to the next generation. The daughters of child brides are markedly more likely to become child brides themselves.

The direction of travel has been good

There is genuine and underreported progress. The legal consensus that 18 should be the floor has strengthened considerably, and countries have moved: Sierra Leone raised its minimum age in 2024, and it is not alone.

The Center for Global Development estimated in the spring that child marriage rates have continued to decline, and the global trend over three decades is downward. This is one of the areas where sustained advocacy has demonstrably changed law and behaviour.

What is pushing the other way

The pressure now comes from instability rather than from ideology, and that makes it harder to counter.

Child marriage is, among other things, a coping strategy. Families facing displacement, food insecurity or the collapse of local services marry daughters early because it removes a person to feed and, in the calculation being made, secures protection for her. It rises predictably in conflict zones, in refugee populations, and after climate disasters.

This is why a period of international turmoil threatens to reverse decades of progress. The practice is not principally sustained by belief in it, and it therefore does not respond primarily to persuasion.

What actually works

The evidence here is unusually clear, which is what makes inaction so frustrating.

Raising the legal age matters — it removes the state's endorsement and gives officials a basis to refuse. But laws alone move the practice underground. What changes outcomes is keeping girls in school, because education is the single strongest protective factor identified in the research, and because a school place gives a family a reason to wait that a prohibition does not.

Direct cash support to households under acute strain works for the same reason: it addresses the calculation rather than condemning it.

Both require sustained funding at exactly the moment aid budgets are being cut across donor countries. The consensus that girls should not be wives is now broader than it has ever been. The resources that would make it true are moving in the opposite direction.

The loopholes in wealthy countries

It would be a mistake to file this as a problem belonging entirely elsewhere.

Several American states permit marriage below 18 with parental or judicial consent, and thousands of such marriages have been recorded in recent decades. England and Wales only raised the minimum age to 18 without exception in 2023; before that, 16 and 17-year-olds could marry with parental permission.

Those exemptions are usually defended as respecting family judgement. In practice, parental consent is frequently the mechanism through which coercion operates, because the person consenting on the child's behalf is often the person arranging the marriage.