Changes in age-at-marriage laws rarely achieve the desired outcome; for this change to be effective, better laws must be accompanied by better enforcement & monitoring to delay marriage & protect the rights of women & girls

Trends in child marriage and new evidence on the selective impact of changes in age-at-marriage laws on early marriage. Ewa Batyra, Luca Maria Pesando. SSM - Population Health, May 4 2021, 100811. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2021.100811

Highlights

• Changes in age-at-marriage laws have only a limited impact on delaying marriage age.

• In Benin, Mauritania, Kazakhstan and Bhutan, laws did not curb early marriage.

• In Tajikistan and Nepal results depends on model specification.

• Better enforcement must accompany the implementation of the age-at-marriage laws.

Abstract: This study adopts a cohort perspective to explore trends in child marriage – defined as the proportion of girls who entered first union before the age of 18 – and the effectiveness of policy changes aimed at curbing child marriage by increasing the minimum legal age of marriage. We adopt a cross-national perspective comparing six low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) that introduced changes in the minimum age at marriage over the past two decades. These countries belong to three broad regions: Sub-Saharan Africa (Benin, Mauritania), Central Asia (Tajikistan, Kazakhstan), and South Asia (Nepal, Bhutan). We combine individual-level data from Demographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys with longitudinal information on policy changes from the PROSPERED (Policy-Relevant Observational Studies for Population Health Equity and Responsible Development) project. We adopt data visualization techniques and a regression discontinuity design to obtain causal estimates of the effect of changes in age-at-marriage laws on early marriage. Our results suggest that changes in minimum-age-at-marriage laws were not effective in curbing early marriage in Benin, Mauritania, Kazakhstan, and Bhutan, where child marriage did not show evidence of decline across cohorts. Significant reductions in early marriage following law implementations were observed in Tajikistan and Nepal, yet their effectiveness depended on the specification and threshold adopted, thus making them hardly effective as policies to shape girls' later life trajectories. Our findings align with existing evidence from other countries suggesting that changes in age-at-marriage laws rarely achieve the desired outcome. In order for changes in laws to be effective, better laws must be accompanied by better enforcement and monitoring to delay marriage and protect the rights of women and girls. Alternative policies need to be devised to ensure that girls’ later-life outcomes, including their participation in higher education and society, are ensured, encouraged, and protected.

Keywords: Early marriageLawsPolicy changesAge at marriageWomen's statusLMICs

Conclusions and discussion

This study has adopted a cohort perspective to explore the extent to which changes in age-at-marriage laws were effective in curbing early marriage across six LMICS which introduced a policy change regarding the minimum age at marriage. We tackled our research question using survey data from countries located in different regions of the world combined with novel longitudinal information on policy changes. We adopted simple causal inference techniques to obtain estimates of the causal effect of changes in age-at-marriage laws on early marriage, in line with the existing literature on the topic relying primarily on difference-in-differences strategies or regression discontinuity designs (Bellés-Obrero & Lombardi, 2020; Collin & Talbot, 2018; Dahl, 2010; McGavock, 2021). In so doing, we reached two different sets of findings. The first set of results suggests that only in Tajikistan and Nepal there have been noticeable declines in child marriage across cohorts. Despite these declines observed in more recent cohorts, the majority of the countries under investigation – particularly Nepal, Bhutan, Mauritania, and Benin – are far from eradicating early marriage, as even among the youngest cohorts around one third of women marries before the age of 18.

Echoing much of the literature (Collin & Talbot, 2018; Kalamar et al., 2016; Koski et al., 2017), the second set of findings suggests that even in these previously unexplored countries, changes in minimum-age-at-marriage laws were not effective in curbing early marriage in Benin, Mauritania, Kazakhstan, and Bhutan, where child marriage showed little evidence of decline across cohorts to start with. Significant reductions in early marriage following law implementations were instead observed in Tajikistan and Nepal – showing, respectively, a decreasing trend overtime after the 1975–79 and 1980–84 cohorts – yet their effectiveness depends on the specification and threshold (window) adopted, thus making them hardly effective as policies to shape girls’ later life trajectories. As the literature tends to focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Bangladesh, and Mexico, we believe our results for Nepal and Tajikistan are informative and stress an additional layer of novelty even just from a purely “geographical” standpoint.

Our findings relating to the mixed and context-specific effectiveness of policy changes aimed at curbing early marriage aligns with claims made by Arthur et al. (2018) and Collin and Talbot (2018) that, despite the increasing prevalence of legal provisions aimed at increasing the legal age at marriage, the level of enforcement varies widely, and legal exceptions based on parental consent and customary or religious laws remain in place – alongside high rates of illegal or informal marriages (Bellés-Obrero & Lombardi, 2020; Collin & Talbot, 2018) – thus preventing the full effectiveness of the legal provisions. Unfortunately, we did not have data on exact implementation procedures, monitoring, or enforcement, which could also cast light on why reductions in child marriage in Nepal and Tajikistan were more pronounced than in other countries. Nonetheless, several sources suggest that these are serious issues that underlie the very limited effectiveness of changes in legal provisions in countries covered by our analyses overall. In Bhutan, although child marriage is punishable by fine, enforcement is considered to be weak and is exacerbated by lack of reliable marriage registration system (ICRW, 2012). In Nepal, child marriage can carry a prison sentence and/or a fine, but punishment is weakened by wide discretionary sentencing powers given to courts (CRR, 2016). Overall, poor implementation and limited awareness of child marriage legislation are considered to be one of the reasons for the high prevalence of child marriage in South Asia, including Bhutan and Nepal (Khanna et al., 2013). In Tajikistan, child marriages carry a prison sentence of up to six months but, in practice, most cases are only punished by a fine. Moreover, religious ceremonies are sometimes performed without registration of marriages to civil authorities, thus bypassing legislation (UNFPA, 2014). Similar issues around the implementation of laws as in Tajikistan have been identified in Kazakhstan (UNFPA, 2012). We found little information about the working of legislation in Sub-Saharan African countries covered by our study, most notably Benin. Nonetheless, available sources suggest that, in Mauritania, the lack of clarity of the Personal Status Code that sets the minimum age at marriage renders it ineffective in having any meaningful impact on marriage practices.3 Albeit scarce, the available evidence consistently points to weak enforcement of the new legislation across countries included in our study.

Our results combined suggest that there is a long way to go before child marriage is eradicated, and changes in legal provisions are playing only a minimal role, if any. This pushes scholars and policymakers to think about alternative policies that might be more effective in curbing early marriage or delaying age at first union. For instance, Kalamar et al. (2016) found that providing incentives for girls’ education was one of the few interventions that have been shown to effectively prevent child marriage. Many of the studies included in that review were conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa. Randomized evaluations in Kenya, Malawi, and Zimbabwe also found that reducing the cost of schooling by providing school fees, uniforms, or cash transfers conditional on attendance reduced the incidence of child marriage (Baird et al, 2010, 2012; Hallfors et al., 2015). A pilot program in Ethiopia that provided girls with mentorship and economic incentives to remain in school – and facilitated community discussion about the harms associated with child marriage – reduced the proportion of girls between ages 10 and 14 who were married by approximately 8 percentage points after a two-year follow-up period, although the program had no measurable effect on the marriage of girls between ages 15 and 19 (Erulkar & Muthengi, 2009).

Preventing early, coerced, and forced marriage has been on the global agenda for several decades, first in 2000 with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) highlighting the reduction of child marriage as a global priority, and then in 2015 as part of the global agenda with the establishment of the SDGs. We have here argued that SDG Goal 5 – focusing on gender equality to empower all women and girls – is linked with progress on the elimination of early marriage, yet it is also inextricably linked with SDG Goal 4, related to better access and more gender-equal participation in education, Goal 3 (good health and wellbeing), Goal 8 (decent work and economic growth) and, ultimately, Goal 1 (no poverty). Significant progress is nowhere close, yet a clear implication ensuing from this study is that better enforcement and monitoring of legal provisions concerning the minimum age at marriage – if effective – would have the potential to raise women's status by simultaneously enabling the achievement of multiple goals. We thus posit two clear implications of this research for policy and speculate on a third point. First, the laudable goal of legislation curbing or banning early marriage must be accompanied by capacity-building and resourcing for more legal enforcement. Second, monitoring the efficacy of deterrence, including through exploiting cheap and plentiful micro-level data as we do here, is essential to test and improve the link from laws to ages at marriage, the outcome targeted by policy and the one that matters most for women and girls' later-life outcomes. Third, we speculate on the possibility that national marriage policies might have a more meaningful impact if part of a comprehensive, multi-pronged, and context-sensitive approach targeting poverty and rooted social norms in all their forms – such as some of the complementary interventions (including educational interventions) mentioned above.