COVID‐19 and child marriage: A red flag

Samarah: Jurnal Hukum Keluarga dan Hukum Islam, 2021

The increase in marriage dispensation applications that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic also caused the high number of child marriage. Nevertheless, this has been strictly required in Law Number 16 of 2019 concerning Amendments to Law Number 1 of 1974 concerning Marriage (Marital Law), the minimum age limit for men and women is 19 years, and requirements of irregularities for this age that must meet urgent criteria and sufficient support evidence. This is done, to reduce underage child marriages as a form of enforcing the principle of children's best interests. This paper describes the complexity of underage children's marriage during the Covid-19 pandemic period, as a convenience requirement of marriage dispensation has been set rigid in the Marriage act. The method used in this paper is normative by using several approaches: the statute approach, conceptual approach, and case approach. The results of the government's policy during the Covid-19 pandemic period whi...

Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Sports, Health, and Physical Education, ISMINA 2021, 28-29 April 2021, Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia, 2021

Covid-19 has had a major negative impact on the lives. One of them is an additional 10 million child marriages this decade. An increase in the number of child marriages has also occurred in Indonesia. This study used the 2017 IDHS data. To strengthen the study, references from relevant journal articles were also added. In Indonesia, the provinces with the highest percentage of teenage marriage aged 10-14 years were Central Java (52.1%), South Kalimantan (9%), West Java (7.5%), while the provinces with the highest percentage of cases of teenage marriage aged 15-19 years were Central Kalimantan (52.1%), West Java (50.2%), and South Kalimantan (48.4%). Child marriage has jumped up to 300 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Child marriage were due to differences in knowledge, education, economy and culture factors in various regions in Indonesia.

UNICEF Child Protection Learning Brief #3, 2021

Global Policy: Child, Early and Forced Marriages and Unions, 2020

"Plan International condemns the practice of child, early and forced marriage and unions which is a violation of human rights, a harmful practice and, in some cases, a form of gender-based violence. In line with the Joint General Recommendation No.31 of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women/ General Comment No.18 of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (2019) on harmful practices, Plan International believes that all countries should set a minimum age of marriage of 18 and require the free, full and informed consent of both parties. This should apply to both girls and boys, and there should be no exceptions, including any requiring parental, spousal or judicial consent. Countries should also ensure that national laws to this effect take precedence over any conflicting provisions under customary, religious and traditional law."

Journal of Peace, Development and Communication , 2022

More than 60 million women throughout the world are affected by adolescent marriage, which is defined as marriage before the age of 18. In low-income countries including, Pakistan, this is increasingly widespread. Despite the fact that the universal age for women to marry is 18, but girls are married earlier in poor countries, particularly in South Asian countries. Even in the twenty-first century, child marriage is common around the world. Early marriage is prohibited by national and international laws. Despite of it, child marriages are in practices because no punishment is given to those people who are involved in it. If the proper implement of laws, child marriage can be ended from the world. However, it failed to end child marriage because no legal action is given against involved people. The literature review endeavor to shed light on the law situation of child marriage, focusing legal aspects of violation of child marriage. The breach of international and state law by underage marriage is discussed in this study.

Journal of Adolescent Health, 2021

The study projects the potential impact of COVID-19 on child marriage in the five countries in which the burden of child marriage is the largest: Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, India, and Nigeria. Methods: The projected impact of the pandemic on child marriage is based on a Markov model. A review of empirical and theoretical literature informed construction and parameter estimates of five pathways through which we expect an elevated marriage hazard: death of a parent, interruption of education, pregnancy risk, household income shocks, and reduced access to programs and services. Models are produced for an unmitigated scenario and a mitigated scenario in which effective interventions are applied to reduce the impact. Results: The total number of excess child marriages in these five countries could range from 3.5 million to 4.9 million in the unmitigated scenario and from 1.8 million to 2.7 million in the mitigated scenario. The elevated risk compared with the baseline projection would continue until 2035. Conclusions: These projections represent the impact in five countries that account for 50% of child marriages globally, implying that if similar patterns hold, we might expect the number of excess child marriages due to the pandemic to reach 7 million to 10 million globally. These estimates are necessarily subject to high levels of uncertainty because of limited evidence on the impacts in relation to child marriage and for parameter estimates. It will likely take years to understand the full impact of the pandemic. Despite these limitations, the potential for harm is unquestionably large.

C hild marriage violates girls' human rights and adversely affects their health and well-being. While age at marriage is increasing in most regions of the developing world, early marriage persists for large populations. Worldwide, it is estimated that more than one out of three women aged 20-24 were married before age 18, and one out of seven were married before age 15 (Population Council analysis of 2006 DHS data). There is great variation in child marriage practices across and within regions and between ethnic and religious groups. The highest proportions of child brides are typically found in West Africa and South Asia (see Table 1 for some regional hotspots of child marriage). Eradicating child marriage has long been on the agenda of the United Nations and of individual countries. Indeed, all countries where child marriage occurs are signatories to international charters and covenants that discourage the practice. International human rights instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979), the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990), provide four main protections against child marriage:

* Countries that set age 18 as the legal minimum age of marriage but permit exceptions under the law (e.g., with parental or judicial consent) were not considered to have laws banning child marriage. Since the publication of these data, five countries (Bangladesh, Gambia, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania) have passed legislation modifying their legal minimum age of marriage. The current statistic reflects these recent changes.

Ending Child Marriage: Child Marriage Laws and Their Limitations , 2017

Child marriage is defined as a formal or informal union before the age of 18. Child brides are at greater risk of experiencing a range of poor health outcomes, having children at younger ages when they are not yet ready to do so, dropping out of school, earning less over their lifetimes, and living in poverty compared to their peers who marry at later ages. These dynamics affect not only the girls themselves, but also their children and households, as well as communities and entire societies. Furthermore, in many countries, it remains legal to marry a girl before she turns 18, and even in countries where marriage before 18 is in principle illegal, too many girls continue to marry early. This brief summarizes findings from research undertaken by save the children and the World Bank on the lack of legal protection against child marriage for girls and marriages that take place below the national minimum age of marriage. The analysis suggests that many countries still do not effectively legally protect girls against child marriage, but also that legal reforms are not sufficient to end the practice as many girls marry illegally in countries where legal protections are in place. While protecting girls in the law against child marriage is an important first step, additional interventions are needed to prevent child marriage.

International Journal of Criminology and Sociology, 2021

The practice of child marriage in Indonesia is a serious problem that must be resolved. This is a problem faced in various countries in the world. The SDG's programs include achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls, with a target to achieve the abolition of child marriage by 2030. The research method used is a social-legal approach. The purpose of this study is to find out the government's efforts in overcoming the problem of gender inequality in the age requirements for marriage in Indonesia and the application for dispensation for marriage during the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia. The old Marriage Law stipulates that the age of marriage for men is 19 years and for women 16 years. The government then changed this provision through Law Number 16 of 2019 concerning Marriage, in which the marriage age for men and women is the same, which is 19 years. During the Covid-19 pandemic, applications for marriage dispensation in Indonesia indicated a sharp increase. This means that the application for marriage dispensation is unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic situation. The existence of exceptions through dispensation efforts makes the requirements for the age of marriage can still be deviated, so that gender equality, which is expected to minimize child marriages above, cannot be realized or cannot be carried out as desired.