As mentioned earlier, this study analyzed the minimum age for marriage of the laws of 191 countries in 2013. Overall results and results by region are presented. In addition, analyses of legislative changes in 106 countries from 1995 to 2013 were conducted and presented. Prior to 1929, Scottish law followed Roman law by allowing a girl to marry at the age of twelve and a boy at fourteen without the need for parental consent. However, marriage in Scotland at such a young age was almost unknown in practice. [30] In countries such as India, where the legal age of marriage is 18 for women and 21 for men, the person who was a minor at the time must file a complaint to have the marriage annulled. This limits the effectiveness of the law. In most countries in northwestern Europe, marriages at a very young age were rare. One thousand marriage records from 1619 to 1660 in the Archdiocese of Canterbury show that only one bride was 13 years old, four were 15 years old, twelve were 16 years old and seventeen were 17 years old; while the other 966 brides were at least 19 years old. [27] The codification of Islamic family law in the Ottoman Empire in 1917 distinguished between the age of marital jurisdiction, which was set at 18 for boys and 17 for girls, and the minimum age of marriage, which followed the traditional Hanafi minimum age of 12 for boys and 9 for girls. Marriage before age is allowed only if proof of sexual maturity is recognized by the court, while marriage before the minimum age is prohibited. To capture the legal provisions shaping child marriage around the world, we created a database for 193 United Nations (UN) Member States.
1 We constructed variables for the minimum age of marriage and exceptions that allow marriage at a lower age under certain conditions. We conducted a systematic review of the legislation that began in June 2013 via the countries` official websites, the Lexadin World Law Guide, the Foreign Law Guide, the International Labour Organization (ILO) NATLEX database, the Pacific Islands Institute of Legal Information, the Asian Institute for Legal Information, JaFBase and libraries such as the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law, the University of California, Los Angeles Law Library, Harvard Law School Library, and Northwestern University Library. Where legislation was not available from these sources, analysts reviewed country reports and concluding comments of the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. Take our quiz to find out which of our nine political typology groups is right for you. 1.This database can be explored in more detail on our website: worldpolicycenter.org/topics/marriage/policies. In France, until the French Revolution, the age of marriage was 12 for women and 14 for men. The revolutionary legislation of 1792 raised the age to 13 for women and 15 for men. Under the Napoleonic Code of 1804, the age of marriage was set at 15 for women and 18 for men. [31] In 2006, the age of marriage was raised to 18 for both women and men. In jurisdictions where the age is not equal, the age of marriage for women is more often two or three years lower than that for men.
In England and Wales, the Marriage Act 1753 required that a marriage be covered by a licence (which required parental consent for persons under 21) or the publication of banns (which parents of persons under 21 could prohibit). In addition, the Church of England stipulated that the bride and groom had to be at least 21 years of age to marry without the consent of their family; In certificates, the most common age for brides is 22. For the bride and groom, 24 was the most common age, with an average age of 24 for the bride and groom and 27 for the bride and groom. [27] While European nobles often married early, they constituted a small minority of the population,[28] and Canterbury marriage certificates show that even among nobles it was very rare to marry women very early. [27] One of the reasons Chad has the lowest marriage rate in the world is related to the legal age of marriage. Before 2015, the legal age of marriage in the country was only 15. In fact, the rate of child marriage in Chad in 2015 was staggering 68%. Things like malnutrition, drought, illiteracy, high cost of living, and other factors are all responsible for these high rates. In 2015, the legal age of marriage was raised to 18, but the practice is still widespread. The practice is unique not only for the poor, but also for the rich in a society. The Chadian government`s 2016 resolution was created to ensure the end of child marriage by 2018. “Deciding when and who to marry is one of life`s most important decisions,” said UN Population Fund Executive Director Dr.
Babatunde Osotimehin at the launch of the UN initiative. “Child marriage deprives millions of girls of this choice every year.” Many young girls are forced to become “de facto wives” before reaching the age when they can be legally married. Results on the link between legal measures and economic development have been mixed. High-income countries are more likely to set 18 as the minimum age for marriage when religious and customary exceptions are allowed, but there is no such association for the legal age of marriage with parental consent or the general legal age of marriage. Although there is a three- or four-year income gap for the minimum age of marriage, no trend has been observed in the percentage of countries without a gender gap. There are countries at all income levels that have strict laws on child marriage, which shows that regardless of income, it was possible to adopt this type of legislation. The situation in Myanmar is somewhat different. While the usual problems of developing countries affect the marriage rate, literacy plays a crucial role. People tend to marry their academic peers.
However, the low average age may also be due to the fact that a relatively higher number of women, about 12%, remain single even at the age of 50. Some fathers arranged marriages for a son or daughter before he reached the age of maturity, which is similar to what some fathers did in ancient Rome. Completion would only take place at the age of maturity. Roman Catholic canon law defines marriage as consummated when the “spouses have performed among themselves in a human manner a matrimonial act which is in itself proper to the procreation of offspring, to which marriage is essentially ordained and by which the spouses become one flesh.” [23] There are marriage records of two- and three-year-olds: in 1564, a three-year-old child named John was married to a two-year-old child named Jane at the court of the Bishop of Chester, England. In this study, two samples were analyzed to obtain both an overall overview using current data and an overview of changes over time for a subset of countries. The 2013 cross-sectional analysis included data on legislation from all 191 UN Member States, for which information was both available and clear. We were unable to code two countries: St. Kitts and Nevis because of unavailable source information, and Myanmar because its legal requirements were ambiguous. The sample for the longitudinal analyses was collected as part of the Maternal and Child Health Equity 2 research program, which aims to investigate how important social policies affect the burden of disease in children and women. This sample includes 106 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) included in the DHS and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, for which we were able to collect comprehensive comparable information on minimum age of marriage laws between 1995 and 2013. The LMIC countries in this sample represent the countries with the highest early marriage rates. Figures 2 and 3 show the frequency distribution of the minimum age of marriage across five age groups for girls and boys separately.
