The Relationship between Child Labour and Child Marriage: A Discourse Analysis
Summary & Objectives
The paper aims to clarify how child marriage and child labour are related in international law, policy, and practice, with a focus on South Asia. It synthesizes legal definitions and statistical frameworks for child labour, forced labour, slavery, trafficking and child, early and forced marriage, and then examines how current discourse and available evidence describe overlaps between these practices in children’s lives. It also seeks to identify key conceptual and empirical gaps that need to be addressed to better align child labour and child marriage agendas and strengthen child rights–based responses
Findings
The analysis shows that child marriage frequently meets international criteria for forced labour, slavery-like practices and trafficking, especially where girls’ labour, movement and sexuality are controlled and exchanged within marriage, yet it is not consistently treated as child labour in law, statistics or programmes. Existing child labour measures largely miss unpaid domestic and care work performed by married girls, while child marriage work tends to overlook the labour and economic exploitation embedded in many unions. The literature highlights multiple pathways: child marriage can be a form of worst child labour (servile or forced marriage), can lead to exploitative work (domestic servitude, bonded labour, hazardous unpaid household services), or can occur alongside child labour as a joint outcome of poverty, gender discrimination, dowry and restrictive social norms. The evidence base remains thin on children’s own decision-making, the continuum of consent and coercion in arranged and self-initiated unions, and on how marriage, work and migration intersect over time. Policy and programme responses to child marriage and child labour are still siloed, despite shared drivers and overlapping harms.
Recommendations
The report recommends strengthening conceptual clarity and legal guidance on when child marriage should be recognized and counted as child labour, forced labour or slavery-like practice, to reduce gaps between norms and implementation. It calls for more empirical research, including time-use data and indicators that capture years spent in child marriage and hazardous unpaid household services, and qualitative work on adolescents’ agency, bargaining strategies and ability to withdraw consent. It urges closer integration of child labour and child marriage agendas under SDGs 5.3 and 8.7, including coordinated regional and national action plans, and responses that address shared structural drivers such as poverty, gender inequality, discriminatory norms, debt and migration. Finally, it emphasizes that any legal or programmatic action should be firmly grounded in child rights principles, prioritizing protection and empowerment of married and working children rather than punitive approaches that further marginalize them
Share your research
You can share details of your ongoing and upcoming research to be included in the CRANKs online research tracker. By doing this, you are contributing to a coordinated, harmonised global research agenda.