We wanted to hear directly from law enforcement officials about deprivation of marriage, as they could be involved in local practice through child welfare committees. In Nkhata Bay, a male law enforcement official described the process of marriage deprivation: Before the end of Second Temple Judaism, rabbis set the age of marriage for each Israelite at 18. [273] Women were expected to marry at age 20 and men at age 24. Globally, the average legal age of marriage is 17 for boys and 16 for girls, but most countries allow marriage in much younger age groups, especially girls. For example, in the United States, Alaska, South Carolina and Louisiana, 12-year-old girls are allowed to marry, and in Massachusetts, 12-year-old girls can marry under special circumstances and with the approval of the judge. In fact, although the legal age of marriage is 18 in most states, each state allows exceptions such as parental consent or pregnancy, allowing marriages at a lower age. According to studies, more than 200,000 children under the age of 18 were married in the United States alone between 2000 and 2015. According to UNICEF, 12 million girls under the age of 18 marry worldwide. Even in England, whales and Northern Irish teenagers can marry at the age of 16 if they get their parents` consent. At the other end of the spectrum in China, due to population control policies, the age of marriage is slightly higher than in other countries, 22 for men and 20 for women.
According to the NGO Girls Not Brides, there are currently more than 700 million women worldwide who were married as children. Currently, the highest percentage of child marriages in the world (23 million marriages) belongs to Nigeria. According to figures released by UN Women, a third of girls in developing countries marry before the age of 18, while some countries do not conduct censuses for births and marriages, there are also insufficient measures in these countries to prevent early marriage of girls. According to this UN body, although many countries have set the legal age of marriage, in practice they have ignored the existing realities regarding underage marriage or are trying to suspend it for various reasons. Several countries no longer punish child marriages and only consider such marriages illegitimate. Marriages at a lower age are also common in many Islamic countries. Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are countries that do not prohibit girls from marrying at a younger age. According to Population Reference Bureau figures released in 2013, one in seven girls in the Arab world marries before the age of 18. In the same study, 13% of married women in Morocco have not yet reached legal age, compared to 8% in Jorden.
Even in most Arab countries, women are still not allowed to sign their marriage contracts and need the consent of their father or male guardian. Note: Data refer to the youngest possible age at which it is legal to marry with parental consent. The legal age of marriage without parental consent will be higher. They go to the man who married the girl, they remove the girl from the marriage. This is how early marriages end. Even if the girl is pregnant, the girl will take care of the pregnancy in her parents` house and the man will be single. If she is still willing to go back to school after giving birth and has money to pay school fees, she goes back to school. Adolescents needed parental consent to marry because they had not reached the age of majority, 21.
In the 12th century, the Roman Catholic Church radically changed the legal norms for marital consent by allowing girls over the age of 12 and sons over the age of 14 to marry without their parents` consent, even if their marriage was contracted secretly. [16] Community studies have confirmed that in the late Middle Ages, women in England sometimes married without parental consent. [17] These analyses were carried out to provide a comprehensive picture of differences in the minimum legal age of marriage, where and to what extent legislation meets and falls below international standards, where gaps enabling child marriage undermine legal requirements that meet international standards, and the extent to which the minimum age of marriage differs by sex and the magnitude of the age difference. The regional disaggregation of these results makes it possible to compare policy approaches to regulating the age of marriage around the world. These comparisons help identify outliers in specific regions, in terms of leading companies in protecting girls and countries lagging behind. Income analyses are beginning to assess whether the level of national economic development supports or explains the legalization of early marriage. A review of interventions to address child marriage (2016) included a review of programmes focused on promoting an enabling legal and policy environment [29]. Three programs focused on the legal and policy environment as the main strategy: These “activist programs,” as the authors call them, were evaluated less rigorously and less effectively, according to this report. The authors suggest that legal and policy efforts should be complemented by other programmatic approaches to maximise the impact on reducing child marriage [29], similar to proposals by Wodon et al. (2017) [28]. One of these studies, which focused solely on policy changes, looked at the application of the minimum age in Indonesia`s marriage laws and found that the law did not appear to have much direct impact. However, the authors suggest that the law may instead have had an indirect effect in assessing women`s autonomy and freedom of choice and creating alternative role opportunities for women [30].
In Afghanistan, for example, the legal age of marriage is 16 (or 15 with the consent of a parent or guardian and the court) for girls and 18 for boys. However, international and local observers continued to report widespread forced and early marriages. The knowledge that violations of marriage laws result in significant fines is widespread, and withdrawals from marriage are seen by some respondents as a way to enforce the spirit of child marriage laws while avoiding fines. Some respondents suggested that enforcing marriage laws has an unintended effect by driving marriages underground. An important discrepancy between the laws and the realities of child marriage practices in these communities is that the law makes parents responsible for marriage and prevents it, while parents do not necessarily exercise control, especially if the marriage is triggered by pregnancy.
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