Sierra Leone bans child marriage in huge win for activists
Sierra Leone’s Parliament passed a historic bill criminalizing child marriage, a major victory for campaigners in a region that has the highest prevalence of the practice in the world.
The bill, which includes jail terms of up to 15 years or a hefty fine for perpetrators, still needs to be signed into law by President Julius Maada Bio.
The West African country is home to 800,000 child brides, half of whom were married before the age of 15, according to a 2019 UNICEF report.
Human rights-inflected messaging may fall short
West and Central Africa have the highest prevalence of child marriage in the world — and despite a steady global decline, it will take another 300 years to end the practice at the current rate of progress, which has so far largely benefited the wealthiest, a 2023 UNICEF report found. It may be dangerous to generalize the reasons for child marriage, so interventions should be carefully tailored to the community in question: Some regard child marriage as a way to protect girls, and are therefore more receptive to education and health-based messaging than the human rights discourse of “harmful traditional practices,” the nonprofit Girls Not Brides said.
Not just a ‘foreign problem’
Four US states — California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Mississippi — have no minimum marriage age, according to the nonprofit Unchained At Last, and although lawmakers’ failure to press for reforms may be because the number of minors marrying has fallen dramatically, official statistics are almost certainly an undercount, a campaigner told The Economist in 2022. Inaction is fielded by the mistaken belief that child marriage is a “foreign problem,” a columnist argued in Al Jazeera. The politics of child marriage cuts across the political spectrum: Planned Parenthood, for example, may fear “that if minors can’t consent to marriage, the argument could be made that they shouldn’t be able to consent to an abortion either,” an international affairs professor wrote in The Atlantic.
