The Global Slavery Index 2023

Spotlights: Understanding Forced and Child Marriage (Part 2)

​Pandemic-driven reversals 
While the number of people living in a forced marriage increased since the 2017 Global Estimates, current figures only partially account for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the spread of COVID-19, UNICEF estimated that one in five girls were married before the age of 18. While a significant population, it is a reversal of previous trends, meaning there were 25 million fewer child marriages than estimated in the previous decade. However, following the spread of COVID-19, UNICEF and UNFPA estimated an additional 10 million to 13 milliongirls will be married due to the impacts of the pandemic. 
 
Vulnerability has increased around the world in the aftermath of the pandemic, and particularly in Asia and the Pacific, Africa, and the Americas, where there are already higher risks of forced and child marriage. Not only has the level of extreme global poverty risen for the first time in 20 years as a result of increased global unemployment, job losses, and increased indebtedness, but food insecurity and gender-based violence have also increased as a direct result of COVID-19 and related mitigation measures. For example, a greater number of women and girls have been exposed to sexual, physical, and psychological abuse from family members and intimate partners because of lockdown restrictions, thereby increasing their risk of forced and child marriage. Additionally, 24 of 26 Protection Clusters — coordinated groups of humanitarian organisations working to meet the diverse needs of people affected by crises — reported an increase in gender-based violence since the pandemic began. This reflects broader global trends as rates of violence against women increased since the pandemic, corresponding with a lack of access to social services and the impact of stay- at-home orders confining victims to spaces with their abusers.
 
Efforts to prevent the spread of the virus have also created barriers to services, including identification mechanisms. Public health measures reduced the ability of grassroots and service delivery organisations to undertake their work, resulting in the closure of services or reduced budgets to support vulnerable people and survivors of forced marriage. For example, in Niger and Kenya, safe houses were closed, creating a gap in the protection of girls at risk of gender-based violence. In Morocco, at-risk individuals were reluctant to access services due to fears of contracting COVID-19. Further research on the impact of COVID-19 on risks to forced marriage among marginalised groups is urgently required, including on delivery of services for hard-to-reach populations. 
 
Ending forced and child marriages 
A strong, multifaceted global approach is needed to end forced and child marriage and achieve the SDG targets, in particular SDG 8.7 on the eradication of modern slavery, SDG 5.3 on eliminating child, early, and forced marriage and female genital mutilations, and SDG 16.2 to end abuse, exploitation, trafficking, and all forms of violence against children. This will require norms change across national, community, and household levels to ensure that harmful norms that perpetuate risk are dismantled. It will also require empowering vulnerable communities to be resilient in the wake of shocks that spur risk of forced marriage. 
 
Globally, there are insufficient legal protections against forced and child marriage. Most countries have not ratified the UN Convention on Consent to Marriage, Marriage Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriages, nor fully criminalised forced marriage in national legislation. Further, only 35 countries have set a minimum age of marriage at 18 without exception. Harmful attitudes and practices that increase women’s and girls’ risk of forced and child marriage remain entrenched in laws around the world. Examples are legal loopholes that exonerate rapists from punishment if they marry their victim, customary laws that allow widowed women to be inherited by a male relative of their deceased husband, laws that leave women or their children stateless or those that do not allow women to hold or inherit land and property.
 
While important, legislation alone will not end forced and child marriages. For example, it was found that legislation banning child marriage and imposing fines for non-compliance in Malawi drove the practice underground and led to methods such as marriage hiding or marriage withdrawal, which involves parents or community members intervening to forcibly return a married girl to her natal home, being used to avoid fines. Legal protections must be diversified beyond criminalising forced marriages. Such measures should include civil protection orders that are independent of other legal proceedings. To ensure protection measures are trauma-informed and put survivors at the centre, survivors must be able to choose which solution best suits their needs as not all wish to pursue criminal actions, particularly when it can involve bringing an action against family members.
 
Programs to reduce child marriage should target underlying drivers such as poverty and the lack of alternatives to child marriage. Interventions are also needed at the community and household levels to challenge social norms that create risk of forced marriage. These interventions should involve a range of advocates, including faith and community leaders, and must also combat harmful understandings of masculinity that silence and shame male victims and prevent them from seeking assistance. 
 
Ensuring adolescent girls have access to education is essential: when a girl receives an education, her earning potential increases by almost 12 per cent per year of schooling, helping to alleviate household poverty. However, current estimates predict that 20 million adolescent girls will never return to the classroom when schools reopen after the pandemic. To ensure girls enter and return to the schoolroom, multi-generational behaviour change campaigns that specifically target heads of family must be delivered together with education and poverty alleviation measures. Additionally, new pathways to education and employment must be opened for already-married girls to return to school and for adult women to be economically empowered. This is critically important in the wake of learning losses caused by COVID-19, which saw 1.6 billion students around the world having their learning disrupted, left 129 million girls out of school in 2020, and led to a higher rates of teen pregnancy in lower and lower-middle income countries.
 
In addition to enhancing access to education, reducing the risks of exploitation faced by vulnerable groups, such as people living in crisis situations, will require efforts to combat forced marriage to be embedded, prioritised, and adequately resourced within broader humanitarian actions. This should be context-specific, so as to enhance effectiveness in addressing risk factors for the impacted population, and will require coordinated and comprehensive action across all appropriately trained stakeholders from the beginning of a crisis through to recovery. In the aftermath of COVID-19, it is clear that existing institutions must be “future-proofed” to better respond to crises. This will require strengthening institutions that support the most vulnerable people, including social services and welfare, as well as enhancing access to sexual and reproductive health services and dismantling legal frameworks that embed norms which create risks to forced and child marriage. 
 
Walk Free 2023. Global Slavery Index 2023. Minderoo Foundation Ltd. Australia.