CRANK research meeting: The intersections of child marriage – Strengthening holistic and cross-sectoral solutions

In this final research meeting of 2024, we explored evidence that highlights the need to think holistically about child marriage, and to work across sectors and levels – from the relational to the community and structural levels.

Drawing on research shared at the recent Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI) Forum, we considered the intersections of child marriage with violence against women and girls, sexual and reproductive health, education, employment opportunities, and social norms. We discussed the implications for programming and policy to advance girls’ and women’s rights.

Working across these intersections is key to our collective efforts to enhance girls’ economic and political agency, and to catalyse norms change at scale.

Key takeaways

• A multisectoral approach with strong, coordinated partnerships is needed to remove the barriers to social norms change, and ensure policies and interventions to address child marriage are holistic, sustainable and scalable. This means:
  • Leveraging existing partnerships, strengthening coordination across sectors and building multisectoral efficiency for deeper impact at a larger scale and reach, particularly in the current context of unsteady, unreliable funding.
  • Mapping and engaging relevant stakeholders – like government, civil society groups, service providers and institutions, law enforcement and legal aid – and channels for engagement from the beginning. This can help ensure long-term funding, referrals and support services are in place to promote girls’ education, economic opportunities, health, safety and access to justice. Establishing or strengthening a multisectoral task force at different levels can help respond to, for example, cases of backlash, intimate partner violence (IPV) or school re-entry identified through the intervention.
  • Partnering with governments from the beginning to promote multisectoral policy engagement and to support the government to ensure that smaller successful interventions can be replicated and/or scaled up in other regions, and that there is investment in relevant support services.
  • Undertaking advocacy that is not only focused on child marriage, but which integrates girls’ agency, empowerment and safeguarding. Education and educational institutions can be a strong entry point for this work.
• Work to shift norms and end child marriage needs to take a socioecological approach and funders need to invest in this. Such approaches combine complementary interventions at the individual, interpersonal, community and systems level to support girls’ agency and mitigate against backlash. This includes:
  • Building girls’ and women’s knowledge, confidence and skills, including how to communicate, negotiate and offer alternatives to child marriage. This can support their individual and collective agency to resist social norms, as they know what they want (aspiration, e.g. staying in or returning to school) and how to achieve it (agency, e.g. negotiating with parents/husbands). Using age-appropriate curricula/toolkits – including for careers counselling and leadership training – delivered through safe spaces, women’s collectives or health centres can be effective.
  • Engaging with parents and husbands/partners on gendered power imbalances, positive masculinities, and supportive parenting. This can help build improved relationships and allyship and support for adolescent girls’ empowerment, education and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Seeing changes in their parents’ attitudes can in turn increase girls’ aspirations and agency beyond child marriage. Using edutainment or video testimonials of positive behaviours can help initiate these conversations.
  • Engaging mothers and their daughters to understand how the intergenerational transmission of norms, learning, skills and self-confidence works. Harnessing and strengthening the mother-daughter bond to build parents’ support for adolescent girls’ education also works. It can help strengthen the relationship between mothers and daughters, encouraging mothers to support girls’ education rather than marriage – e.g. asking them to study or negotiating with their husband – and consequently daughters’ own agency to resist marriage.
  • Working with community-based facilitators and/or intervention partners as key partners in engaging community members – including faith and community leaders, and boys and men – in supporting girls’ rights. Women’s collectives and community health care workers – with their knowledge of context and existing relationships – can be important partners for community conversations around gender inequality and child marriage. They need to feel safe, have appropriate and ongoing investment and training – including access to evidence-based strategies and adaptive learning – and avoid replicating harmful norms. Emotion-based posters and public pledges may be useful tools in these discussions.
  • Anchoring social norms interventions to strength-points in the community – like women’s collectives – and linking with government for change across the socioecological model in the long term. Women’s collectives that have a federated structure offer an opportunity to strengthen women’s leadership through tailored sessions at each level. These collectives can anchor community-level change and provide a platform to engage with national-level change at the policy and systems level. They can be spaces for girls and women to go beyond child marriage as a vague social norm to identify the needs, behaviours and fears that prohibit change, and to highlight possible solutions; these can then be linked with (multisectoral) government resources and plans.
• Child marriage is the strongest driver of IPV, and both are preventable. They require action at multiple levels and across sectors to transform discriminatory norms and support married girls to leave abusive relationships safely and with access to positive alternatives. This means expanding educational opportunities, especially girls’ access to secondary education and comprehensive sexuality education; challenging discriminatory attitudes and norms, including the acceptability of violence against women and girls and child marriage; and promoting gender equality and girls’ economic rights, including their inheritance and property rights.
• Investment in data and measurement is needed, as this is an important advocacy tool. This should also include sub-national analyses, the identification of context-specific drivers that can be addressed at the local level, and evaluations of what works so we can scale up accordingly.

Details

This CRANK research meeting was moderated by Annabel Erulkar, Senior Associate, International Programs, Population Council. It was a space to:

• Consider the implications of recent evidence for research, programming, advocacy and policymaking.
• Explore the intersection of child marriage with:
  • Sexual and reproductive health and rights, and violence against women and girls, focusing on Ebonyi and Sokoto States, Nigeria, presented by Masturah Baba, Save the Children, Nigeria.
  • Social norms, pathways to education and scale, focusing on rural India, presented by Sushmita Mukherjee, Project Concern International, India.
  • Intimate partner violence against adolescent girls, country level factors and child marriage prevalence – implications for policy, presented by LynnMarie Sardinha, Department of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Research, World Health Organisation - Human Reproduction Programme.
• Hear brief updates from researchers and practitioners on new or current child marriage research.

You can find all the resources from this meeting – recordings, presentations, key takeaways and notes – below. We hope you are inspired to use them in your work!