Child Marriage is Solvable

twelve million children are getting married every year. Child marriage happens everywhere, including right here in America. It was only last year that Delaware and New Jersey became the first states to outlaw marriage for anyone under the age of eighteen. The state of Missouri as the most lenient law in the nation that allows fifteen year olds to wed with only one parent signature required. But child marriage happens most

often in developing countries. The problem cuts across ethnic, cultural and religious lines and can be found everywhere from Africa to the Middle East, Asia to Europe, and like I mentioned here, in America. UNISEPT says that marriage before the age of eighteen often amounts to a fundamental violation of

human rights. There are many things that increase the risk that a child will get married, including poverty, the idea that marriage will provide protection, social norms and ideas about family honor, or even just customary or religious laws that condone child marriage. Countries like Niger and the Central African Republic and Bangladesh, they have among the highest rates of child marriage in the world, and they're all struggling with the multitude of other issues too. In today's episode, you'll

hear Mabel talking mainly about girls. Boys being married is of course a violation of their rights too, but it's far more common for girls. Child marriage is often driven by patriarchal values and the desire to control female sexuality, and the consequences of a child marriage well, they can be devastating. Pregnancy is consistently among the leading causes of

death for girls aged fifteen to nineteen worldwide. Girls who marry before eighteen are more likely to experience domestic violence in their peers who marry later, and it often has

a terrible effect on the girl's mental health too. So this is an extremely worthy solvable that I'm really glad we're discussing Mabel van Uranier has been a global advocate for freedom, justice and development for more than twenty years, and most recently she's thrown herself into her work as the initiator and chair of Girls Not Brides, the Global

Partnership to End Child Marriage. Now that partnership is between more than twelve hundred organizations in more than ninety five countries, and they're all committed to ending child marriage and enabling girls to fulfill their potential. Oh and you'll hear Mabel mention the Elders in a moment. And in case you haven't heard of them, the Elders were set up by Nelson Mandela as a kind of a supergroup of former

heads of state. They all worked together now for peace, justice and human rights, Mary Robinson, Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, basically all of the coolest older people that we've got. That's the Elders. And from two thousand and eight until two and twelve, Mabel was CEO of the Elders. That's when she began to focus on her solvable, which is ending child marriage. All right here she is now in conversation with Jacob Weisberg. Child marriage is happening every year

to twelve million girls all over the world. That means a girl almost every two seconds getting married, and so the number of child brides is not only enormous, but the consequences are really devastating. I know countless stories of girls who told me that their wedding day was the

day they had to leave school. It was the day that they were shipped off to live with a family of a husband who they had never met before, who is older in age often and they go live with their in laws then, and you know, for them, their wedding night is could be the night they get pregnant, even though they themselves are a still a child. And so what you then see is that there's a disproportional high problems around maternal health and even maternal death. For

child brides. The chances that their babies will survive are much lower than women who have their first child after the age of eighteen. They're more often becoming the victims of violence domestic violence by the hands of their husbands or their in law. In some cases, it seems like they're more likely to become HIV infected. And so what child marriage really is for these girls is turning from what was maybe a life with a reasonably bright future.

Turning their lives basically into hell. Now that's happening on a massive skill. But what it also means is that, you know, as a world, we have said we want, you know, to achieve the STGs. Now, eight out of these seventeen sustainable development goals, including education, including maternal health, including infant health, including violence, et cetera, et cetera, they're

linked to child marriage. And so the idea that we can ever get every girl into school, or that we can ever reduce maternal mortality if we continue to ignore the issue of child marriage, it's just a dream. So I believe ending child marriage wouldn't only be really good for these twelve million girls, but it also means that if we ever want to eradicate poverty, we need to make sure that these girls actually can live productive, healthy,

happy lives. So I'm curious, Mabel, what brought you personally to this problem. Why child marriage the thing that you've committed your life to salving. Well, it happened when I was working in twenty ten for the Elders, you know, Nelson Mandela's organization of eminent former presidents, prime ministers, etc. And they, the elders, had said, we want to work

on gender inequality. They felt that that gender inequality is the biggest injustice of the twenty first century, and they specifically wanted to look at that through the lens of how religion and tradition, which are normally forces for good in our lives, too often religion and tradition get misused to justify discrimination against girls and women. And so they

spoke out about that. It got a lot of traction, and then we started looking at like, is there in this whole issue of gender inequality a specific example that would benefit from getting the attention of the elders, but that isn't yet kind of on the global agenda, And at some point I was I was therefore, looking at what could the elders do, and having lunch with a friend and we started talking about child marriage. Was I thought, it's interesting the two words say it, oh, child marriage.

But at the same time I also thought, it's interesting you never hear about it. You know, you would go to these big un conferences about education, or about health, or about development, and the word child marriage was rarely, rarely uttered, And so I thought, I'm curious, is this one hundred thousand girls a year? Is it maybe half a million girls a year? Maybe a million girls a year, And when we then found out it's actually twelve million

girls a year, I felt like, this is crazy. How can there be a problem that is so big that it is having such a huge impact on poverty eradication and it's completely ignored. And I think that's partially because because these girls are more or less invisible. You know, they often they they're miners, they don't speak English in

many cases, they live in far away rural places. So for them to organized and put their issue on the global agenda is just impossible if you think about, you know, the success of the eighths movement, for example, to a large extent that was driven by men infected by the HIV virus who really put the issue on the global agenda. I think another reason why child marriage wasn't really getting the attention it deserved was because it's driven by complex issues.

People do it either because of tradition, so you know, you do it because your generation and the generation before you on the generation before them has always done this, and so people don't really think about it, or people do it because they're concerned about the sexual safety of their daughters. Imagine that she would get pregnant before marriage

and thereby dishonored the family or herself. Some people do it because of poverty, you know, marrying a daughter of means one less mouth to feed, or in the case of India, the younger the girl is, the less high the dowry that the family of the girl has to pay to the family. In the end, it's all related to gender inequality. It's all that idea that girls are

less important than boys. And so I think the reasons why this happens are complex, which is why I think maybe one of the reasons why people didn't want to touch it. And I personally believe the idea that something is complex doesn't mean that therefore it isn't important, and I feel that this is very important. Then the elders agreed, and so we we then said, okay, we're going to change this. You've met girls who have escaped from child marriage. I wonder you give me more of a sense of

the face of the problem. Where is it and what's the experience of these girls, Like do many of them get out? What? Because if you say it's mostly silent in these girls are denied a voice, and we don't hear the story of child marriage from their perspective for the most part. So I've now traveled to many places where child marriage happens, and it happens truly all over world, across religions, across cultures, across continents, and it's an illusion.

I mean, they're none of the Holy Book says marry her daughters before eighteen, but it is happening across all religions, for example, and the highest numbers are in Sub Saharan Africa. The country with the highest percentage rate is Nisa, where three out of every four girls are married before the age of eighteen. The country with the highest absolute number is India, which has obviously a huge population, but also the rates there are quite high. So South Asia is

also really a problematic. But then you see child marriage, for example, also in Latin America, and that the stories of the girls in Latin America are often slightly different than, for example, the girls in Bangladesh or the girls in Africa, And so it's very important to you know, look contact specific why does it happen. For example, in Ethiopia, there are a lot of it seems related to basically tradition.

We always do this, and the many fathers and mothers don't even know that they're alternatives and that actually it would be They think that this is the right thing for their daughters and they don't realize how harmful it is. But in Ethiopia, I'll never forget. I met a group of married girls and there was this girl I was seated next to, and I asked her, how old were

you when you got married? And she said, I don't really know, because I don't know when I was born, because many of these girls don't have burst their difficates. And she said, but I must have been between the age of five and seven when I got married. And this really went like a knife through my heart because at that time my own daughters were five and six years old. And I thought about the lottery of life. If my daughters had had been born there in northern Ethiopia,

they might have been married at that time. And it really felt like this is an injustice, that this cannot continue. I mean, the geography, the place where you're born, should not determine destiny, the chances that you have to live, you know, a well educated and happy life. But then I think of the girls who I met in Indonesia, who some of them ended up in child marriage because sex is a taboo and so people don't really want

to talk about it. And that's not just in Indonesia, that is in many places in the world, including in the West. And so these girls didn't know how you get pregnant. They didn't know that you can have contracept us to avoid getting pregnant. And so these girls, thanks to the inappropriate advances of boys, and pregnant, and that means that they're basically then forced to marry the men who made them pregnant, and normally then also leave school.

So the reasons why it happens are different. And that's why it's also so important when you try to solve this issue that you look carefully at why is it happening in this particular community, what are the reasons, and how can we change it. It wasn't so long ago that the child marriage was totally normal in Europe, in the developed world. I mean, I was just thinking, you know, thorn kerker Guard was engaged to a fifteen year old girl,

Novalace was engaged to a twelve year old girl. These were famous moral philosophers in Europe in the nineteenth century. So how do you avoid the problem of seeming ethnocentric or condescending. We don't do this anymore. Speaking to the developed world, you can't do it anymore. I think it's a very good point. I mean, you cannot come in as an outsider into a community and tell them this is wrong. Stop it. I think if you're ultimately talking

about what needs to happen is social norm change. You need to change what people consider normal, and that can only be done in an effective way if you are do it in a respectful way, and I mean it's done by people who the community trusts. So foreigners walking into a community and saying this is wrong is not going to work. Let's also not forget I don't think that any parent wants to hurt their children. So parents

want the best for their children. So what we see is that when you want to create last change, Yes you need laws that set a minimum age of marriage. Yes you need alternatives. You know, you need to make sure that they're schooling, that there is reproductive health, contraceptives, that all that is available. But in the end, if you really want to get to the point where parents say go from of course my daughter will be married at age fourteen. Two. Of course my daughter will not

be married at the age of fourteen. You need social normative change to happen in the community, and what we know how best to do that is by actually having people who are trusted by the community do that and sit down with them and not tell them what you're doing is wrong, but start talking about And I've seen these programs with my own eyes and it is fascinating.

They take time, but you know, you sit down with everybody in the community every other Friday under the big tree, and you talk about how come that we're so poor, how come that so many of our young girls die in childbirth? How come you know X, y Z. And then you help people understand about rights, you help people understand about alternatives. And what we see happen then is communities that collectively deside by themselves to say, look, we thought we were doing the right thing. We're not longer

gonna marry our daughters at a young age. We know it is better for all of us, not just for the girls, not to do it, and we will all be wealthier and healthier if we do so. And that's

amazing and that's the power of change. And that's what also makes me hopeful that if we can kind of skill these programs up and really empower these local change makers to make it possible for them to work with traditional leaders, with local religious leaders, with the teachers, with anybody who holds power in the community, if they can all work together, all across roots level, I think we can see a change at skill that right now we find still hard to imagine. Yeah, it's such an important

point that norms are more important than laws. I mean, I think you can go all over the United States and find state like Massachusetts where the child marriage is legal if the parents agree to it, you know, the age of twelve, but it doesn't happen because it's not done anymore. But does the law play a role as well? The laws to certain extent plays a role. I mean, well, India has had a law that for about one hundred years that says no marriage under the age of eighteen,

and that was ignored. So laws can play a role if they also get if they get implemented. But changing of laws and discussing laws can help to create an environment in which change is easier. The situation in the United States is actually quite disturbing in that the number of child brides in the United States seems to be

around twenty five thousand per year. If you look at the global skilled child marriage twelve million per year, twenty five thousands isn't a whole lot, but twenty five thousand girls in a country like the United States getting married

every year. I just find that flavor guesting. And what's disturbing is that until about a year or so ago, you could get married in the United States in every state, all of the fifty states, below the age of eighteen, because either states had no minimum age of marriage, or they had a minimum of age of marriage at for example, twelve or sixteen, or those states that had eighteen as the minimum age of marriage, there were so called exemplary

clauses where basically, with the permission of your parents or the permission of a judge, you could actually marry before the age of eighteen. Now that's starting to change. There are two states, New Jersey and Delaware that have changed it. If I remember the states correctly, and we know that they're in Massachusetts and in other states, there's now a push to change the laws, which also helps them to

get a dialogue going. But what I found most disturbing is when I learned that these girls take a girl sixteen year old in the United States who gets married. She's not allowed until she's eighteen to buy a house because legally, for everything else, you need to be eighteen before you can sign any contracts. She's not allowed to vote until she's eighteen years old, because we don't trust her,

apparently with our vote. But if she ends up in an abusive marriage, if her husband actually hits her or mentally abuses her and she wants to escape to a safe house, she's not allowed to enter a safe house on her own because she's a minor. She needs her parents permission for that, her husband's permission, and the same way she can maybe get married, but she can't file for a divorced or she's eighteen. So that's a crazy

situation and that clearly needs to just to change. I'm really heartened that you think child marriage could be eliminated by twenty thirty. That's in eleven years. How will we see that happen? Will it be particular places that we make dramatic progress quickly, or do you think this is going to be a simultaneous global phenomenon of consciousness and reduction and child marriage. It will have to be a magic call mix of all that. So we've looked at, okay,

how do you end child marriage? And we've worked together with one hundred and fifty experts worldwide on looking at what are the interventions needed to end child marriage? And that work took us a year and a half and we developed a theory of change which can be found on the Girls Not Brides dot org website, and basically we found there are four kinds of interventions that need

to happen. First, as you need to empower girls. You need them to realize that they have rights and that child marriage is not necessarily a legal nor a good thing. But just empowering girls is not going to do the trick on its own, because girls constant up to their parents on their own. Secondly, you need to sensitize those who make the decision in the community about when the

girls should get married. The decision makers so that can be the parents, can be the local religious or traditional leaders, and you need to do that as we were discussing in a respectful way. Thirdly, you need to make sure that there are alternative services for these girls. So there needs to be education because if you keep a girl out of marriage but you can't educate her, you're not

really helping her. Similarly, you know, you need to make sure that she gets a reproductive health education and un Fourthly, we need to make sure that there are policies and laws in place and actually getting implemented. And if you do all these things, then we know you can make progress. Now that sounds complex, but at the same time, we see a lot of momentum in people wanting to do this, and again, something being complex doesn't mean that it can't

be done. So we need to do that country by country by country by country, and local non governmental organizations are going to play a big role in that because they're the ones that can really work in the community with the parents and with the families who do this.

But at the same time, when you have governments putting their weight behind this and saying, you know, we the government of Mozambique are now making sure that all our laws say are consistent and say eighteen is the minimum major of marriage, and we're going to have government policy

on ending child marriage. That helps to create momentum and there what we see then, is that governments, once they start because this issue is now on the global agenda and not longer ignored, governments start competing for wanting to be the front runner. So what we need to do is on the one end, change on a grassroots level, but we also need to see change happening at a national level, and then we need that kind of global competition and make the issue relevant or keep it relevant

on a global level. And it's really exciting to see that that's happening. And what I think then what happens if you get this accelerator because people start seeing positive change happening. And what I've learned over my years working on creating social change, not just in the field of child marriage but also in other areas, is when there's positive momentum, people want to be part of it. It

really it works like a magnet. And so I'm sure that with the progress we're seeing, we're only going to pull in more people who want to help to create change, and we're going to see more villages that say, look, we actually want to end child marriage, and so then it will start spreading like a wildfire, which is what makes me hopeful that we can actually do this in what might seem very ambitious in an eleven or twelve year timeframe. May, well, it's wonderful that you've taken on

this problem the way you have. What are some of the things listeners can do if they want to get involved or help reduce and leading towards the elimination of child marriage. Well, what would first of all be wonderful is that if listeners could help to raise awareness about the issue, because yes, compared to a decade ago, there's

much more attention to child marriage, but it isn't enough yet. Secondly, what listeners can do is those who work in the development field, actually, if they work on issues of violence against children, if they work on education, if they work on maternal health, if they work on family planning, in whatever programs they do, it would be good if they take into account the impact that this child marriage is

having on their work. And then people who are not in this field, working in this field, but who feel passionate about this issue, I would encourage them to become part of a new initiative that we've started, which is called the Vow to End Child Marriage vow like a vow, taking a vow and the idea of VOW is basically that everybody in the world can help work together and

can actually make a contribution to end child marriage. And what we're doing is specifically targeting the wedding industry because we believe that it should be possible when a couple in the rich and West gets married and say I do to each other, that they can then help girls elsewhere in the world to say I don't. And so what we're trying to do is make it possible for people who are getting married, or who are renewing their vows, or who are celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary to do

three things. One is they can actually register their wedding registry lists with the note and if they align it with VOW, then up to three percent of all the gifts that money will be given to VOW to support grassroots work, to enter out marriage, to work in the communities. Secondly, you can buy VOW specific VOWL products, like they are specific wedding dresses, and they're going to be other products that if you buy them, a percentage or a fixed

amount will actually go to VOW. And lastly, I mean we live in an age where people feel often they already have everything and they don't need more more stuff in their houses. And so people who feel that way, they can maybe make a donation to vow instead of

asking for gifts. So the idea here is that we're going to get companies and people working in the wedding industry with k baking cakes or doing the wedding flowers, or doing the wedding hair or the wedding makeup, or couples and their friends and family that everybody unites in order to make sure that girls elsewhere in the world can decide whether they want to get married, with whom they want to get married, and most importantly, when they

want to get married. Mabel, thanks for joining us Unsolvable. Thank you for talking about this. I hope that by working together we can make sure that all girls can be girls and all brides. Wow. Well, that conversation certainly upended some assumptions that I had about child marriage. I didn't know the worldwide issue, and I didn't know how big a problem it was twelve million girls. But also, as Mabel said, just because an issue is complex and big doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and

ignore it. I love Mabel's suggestion for a couple's planning a wedding. To use that opportunity to help VOW, you can donate, You can buy VOW products or register your wedding with them, and all the proceeds go to Girls First Fund, who distribute them to local organizations across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. These organizations work tirelessly to prevent child marriage. So you're a big day that could

mean something to girls everywhere. Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and the Rockefella Foundation, with production by Laura Hyde, Hester Kant, Laura Sheeter, and Ruth Barnes from Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer is Neia LaBelle, Research by Sheer, Vincent, engineering by Jason Gambrell and the Great Folks at GSI Studios. Original music composed by Pascal Wise and special thanks to Maggie Taylor, Heather Fine, Julia Barton, Carli Mgliori, Jacob Weisberg

and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn more about solving Today's biggest problems at Rockefeller Foundation dot org, slash Solvable. I'm Mave Higgins. Now go solve it.