The law and child, early and forced marriage and unions. A synthesis of recent evidence on impact and implications

Objectives

Research from the past decade speaks to the shortcomings of CEFMU laws in their design and implementation, particularly when they are not part of a holistic, rights-based approach. Also how implementation deficits, girls’ lack of access to justice, legal plurality, and the contradiction or conflation with sexual consent laws compromise the intended impact.

Research Questions:

1. What are the impacts of CEFMU laws on CEFMU prevalence in different contexts?

2. What are the impacts of CEFMU laws on the prevalence of informal unions in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)?

3. What are the impacts of CEFMU laws on girls’ lives, rights and agency in different contexts?

4. What are the impacts of laws that criminalise sex between consenting adolescents on CEFMU prevalence and on girls’ lives, rights and agency?

Methodology:

• Literature review & synthesis of existing evidence around the impact of laws.

• Consultations with GNB member organisations in LAC and Nepal in September and October 2023 and inputs from GNB members in the global partnership.

Findings

• Laws intended to address child marriage seem to have very limited impact on prevalence, but evidence is limited.

- It is hard to isolate the effect of the law and establish a causal link with CM prevalence

- Laws have had a limited impact on CM prevalence but have raised the age of marriage in some contexts

- Context and identity factors (intersectionality) heavily influence the impact of the law and the dynamics of marriage/union

• Criminalisation and punitive approaches to child marriage can have unintended – and negative – consequences for adolescent girls, their families and children.

- The law does not match adolescents’ realities, and their evolving capacities are rarely considered

- Criminalising adolescent sexuality blocks their access to sexual and reproductive health information and services

- The law is weaponised against girls but also not available for those who need access to justice

- The use of punitive approaches has a range of consequences in girls’ lives

• Girls facing forced marriage and ever-married girls experience social and administrative barriers to accessing justice through the legal system.

Recommendations

• Laws alone cannot end CM but they are an important part of context-specific, gender-transformative approaches to promote girls’ human rights.

• Beyond age of marriage, legal reform needs to create an ecosystem of harmonised laws to support girls’ rights & access to justice.

• The principle of “evolving capacities” is central to the recognition of adolescent girls’ status as rights holders.

• International human rights laws & regional agreements can support national legal reform and accountability efforts.

• The age of marriage and the age of sexual consent must not be combined in law

• More and better social norms research needed to identify and transform the norms and other factors that are resistant to change through legal reform and implementation.

A focus on the law can come at the expense of more comprehensive, holistic endeavours that centre the full range of rights at stake when it comes to talking about CM. There is evidence to suggest social norms related to child marriage are more important - and held more dearly - to communities than legal norms. There will always be a gap between the letter of the law and the realisation of girls’ rights IF more is not done to transform these social norms.