The Guide provides an overview of the scope of the Child, Early, and Forced Marriage (CEFM), its causes and consequence, where it occurs, and why it matters.
Child, Early and Forced Marriage
In the last decade, child, early and forced marriage (CEFM) has affected about 58 million girls. Many of these girls are extremely young, even as young as eight, and are married against their will. In some cultures every seventh girl is married before she reaches the tender age of 15, and age when she should just be finding out about herself, her body, and her potential.
Marrying girls at this age essentially cuts off their chances at a full life – their education stops, they begin having children, and whatever plans they dreamed of for their own futures are not to be. Moreover, not just girls are affected – according to UNICEF, 156 million men alive today were married as children.
Yet another challenge with the early marriage phenomenon is that first pregnancies, in many cultures, are expected immediately after marriage, possibly to prove fertility. Thus for the young girl, she is not only forced into marriage, but is expected to raise a baby within the first year.
And there is a more deadly side to child marriage – girls under 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s, and much more likely to experience complications of childbirth. Being young with little or no power to speak for themselves, they are therefore at greater risk for contracting HIV and other STDs.
CEFM is seen as a human rights violation worldwide and works against the efforts being made to improve maternal health, education, food security, and gender equality for girls. SBCC plays a vital role in raising awareness and inspiring action at all levels of society about the dangers of early marriage.
The Health COMpass presents a selection of tools and project examples in its new Trending Topic. Please contribute your own resources by sending an email to info@thehealthcompass.org or by registering on the site and filling out the contribution form.
Banner Photo: In Jaipur, India, Kriti Bharti sits with two of the young people whose child marriages she helped to get annulled.© 2013 Shariq Allaqaband/Cover Asia Press, Courtesy of Photoshare
Resources
This chart, the result of gathering information from over 150 organizations, maps out the critical strategies to end child marriage and support married girls.
This infographic spells out how child marriage affects girls in terms of poverty, equality, HIV/AIDS, education, health and violence.
This document highlights five evidence-based strategies identified by ICRW to delay or prevent child marriage:
An infographic that outlines five important facts that managers and decision makers should know about child marriage, including:
Promundo and MenEngage Alliance with support from UNFPA produced this Toolkit that addresses strategies and lessons learned for Engaging Men and Boys in diverse themes such as Sexual and Reproductive Health; Maternal, Newborn and Child Health; Fatherhood; HIV and AIDS; Gender-based Violence; Advocacy and Policy, as well as addressing issues around Monitoring and Evaluation of this work.
This is a set of tools and guidelines for strengthening programs for adolescent girls in urban Kenya. Based on discussions from a 2010 meeting of the Kenya Adolescent Girls’ Brain Trust, hosted by the Binti Pamoja Center and the Population Council, the toolkit is written for those interested in working with adolescent girls ages 10–24.
The Inner Spaces, Outer Faces Initiative (ISOFI) toolkit is designed for use by staff of international development and health organizations, and is made up of participatory group activities to help program staff to identify, explore, and challenge their own understanding of gender and sexuality in their lives, the lives of project participants a
This page of facts covers topics rleating to child marriage such as health, education, violence, and religion, and offers the latest statistics on child marriage around the world.
This series of factsheets provides information on the following topics:
This video profiles young girls who were forced into early marriage, and explains the problem in eastern and southern Africa.
This manual was developed as part of a collaboration between World Vision and Promundo in response to harmful societal and cultural practices that support the continuation of child marriage in India.
The Gender Roles, Equality and Transformations (GREAT) Project works to improve gender equity and reproductive health in Northern Uganda.
A poster created for a campaign in Karanataka, India, to discourage child marriage.
The goal of the Chunauti (which means “challenge” in Nepali) project, which was supported by USAID and implemented by CARE, was to decrease the harmful practices of child marriage and gender-based violence in three districts of Nepal - Dhanusha, Mahottari, and Rupandehi - and strengthen the enabling environment at the national and district level
Real Open Opportunities for Transformation Support (ROOTS) is a child and women rights advocacy non-governmental organisation. This banner was hung wherever the organization held community dialogue meetings to raise awareness on the dangers of marrying off children.
This campaign was inspired by a group of youths in the Purulia and Malda districts of West Bengal in 2011. At the center of the campaign were Youth Champions - young change agents identified by Unicef through their network of schools. The campaign strategy was train hundreds of Youth Champions through workshops, empower them to engage other com
This video outlines the multitude of problems created by the phenomenon of child marriage, inclduing those that affect their health, education, and economic status.
CARE's Tipping Point advocacy efforts are geared towards using learning, documentation and analysis to build evidence for advocacy against early marriage and to support momentum for action and change in Bangladesh, Nepal and more broadly.
