Child Marriage

What norms contribute to this practice?

Social norms are the perceived, informal rules that define acceptable, appropriate, and obligatory actions within a given group or community. Some social norms are specific to a particular context, while others may be broad enough to span multiple contexts; even seemingly contradictory norms may exist in the same context.1

The following examples represent social norms relevant to child marriage for adolescents (under 18 years old) that emerged from across the literature. They are not meant to be a comprehensive list of all relevant social norms or norms relevant in all contexts.  

  • Premarital sex, relationships, and even sexual harassment will damage a daughter’s reputation2–12 and the family honor.7–10,12–16 Early marriage is seen as a socially acceptable way to fulfill sexual desires among youth.5,7,9,12,17
    Meta-Norms: Gender Ideology; Social Status
  • Premarital pregnancy, including through rape, brings shame to the family.3,6,7,10,12,18–20 Girls can be pushed to marry their partner,9,10,12,15,21 or parents convinced to accept their child’s desire to marry to avoid stigma.7,12,19
    Meta-Norms: Gender Ideology; Social Status
  • In settings where marriage, including early marriage, is the norm for girls, having older unmarried girls may stigmatize families6,8,9,13,16,18. Proposals are accepted early to avoid this,8,12,14,16,22 particularly if the husband is considered desirable14,16,22 or when there are few eligible men.13
    Meta-Norms: Gender Ideology; Social Status
  • Norms that hinder the autonomy and decision-making of girls in marriage and other decision-making processes limit their agency to advocate for their own interests around marriage.10,12,16,22,23
    Meta-Norms: Authority; Control and Violence; Gender Ideology; Social Status
  • Norms around fears of girls being involved in sexual relationships or experiencing harassment at school may lead to parents not sending them to school.8,16,24 Marriage is then seen as the best option for out-of-school girls.8,13,16,18,21,22,24,25
    Meta-Norms: Gender Ideology; Protection; Social Status
  • Norms endorsing large families increase preference for younger brides, who are seen as more fertile or having more child-bearing years.6,8,9,16,26 Girls are believed to be ready for marriage at menarche or when they are biologically capable of conceiving.5–7,9,11,20
    Meta-Norms: Gender Ideology; Social Status
  • Children should be obedient to authority figures such as their parents;5,7,17 including married girls who are expected to obey their husbands.5,11,16 Marriages arranged by parents are a means to control their children, to prevent unacceptable or disrespectful behavior such as allowing children to elope or make independent decisions.5,7,10 In marriage, men prefer younger girls who are seen as more malleable and easy to control;3,8 older (unmarried) girls are harder to control.6,13
    Meta-Norms: Authority; Control and Violence; Gender Ideology; Social Status
  • Marriage is a means to gaining respect in communities. For girls, it is a way to fulfill the key roles of womanhood, as a wife and mother5,6,12,13,16,18; it may be seen as necessary for protection and provision.3,6,8,12,13,16,18,21,24 For men and boys, becoming the head of a household and bearing financial responsibility carries respect in their community.5,7,18
    Meta-Norms: Authority; Control and Violence; Gender Ideology; Social Status
  • For boys and girls, educational aspirations can be an acceptable reason to delay marriage.5–7,12,18,27 Boys’ readiness for marriage is determined by their ability to support a family, which may (or may not) be improved after completing their education.5,18 Girls’ education can be valued in itself, to contribute to social and economic prosperity for the household and community, as a means to increase her value as a bride, or in instances of excellent academic ability.11,12,16,20,27
    Meta-Norms: Control and Violence; Gender Ideology; Protection; Social Status

What other factors affect this practice?

Child marriage is closely linked with social, religious, and economic expectations from caregivers and communities and the role and influence of reference groups. The practice of child marriage can be influenced by other factors including poverty and families’ socio-economic status, the practice of dowries or bride price in communities, and disaster and displacement. Additional examples are below:

Individual

Community/Environmental

Who influences this practice?

Reference groups, particularly parents, as well as extended families and communities have an important influence on whether girls and boys marry before they turn 18. These reference groups sometimes hold individual attitudes or beliefs that do not support child marriage, although their actions uphold norms of child marriage.

Selected interventions addressing norms and behaviors

  • The Adolescent Girls’ Empowerment Program (AGEP) was designed and implemented by the Population Council, YWCA, Making Cents International, the National Savings and Credit Bank of Zambia (Natsave) and the Zambian Ministry of Health in four provinces of Zambia. This program aimed to build girls’ economic and social assets, with the theory that this would lead to healthy change across a set of outcomes including early marriage, adolescent pregnancy, sexual risk-taking, and transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. The intervention consisted of three components; weekly discussions, health service vouchers, and bank accounts. Weekly ‘safe space’ meetings for girls, separated by the girls’ age and marital status, were facilitated by a trained mentor from their community and provided a safe space to discuss sexual and reproductive health, HIV, and life and financial skills. A multi-arm randomized cluster design evaluation study evaluated the impact of the program 2 years after the completion of the program. Researchers found a positive effect on sexual and reproductive health knowledge, financial literacy, saving behavior, self-efficacy and transactional sex, but no effect on delaying marriage or on gender norms or attitudes. Limitations of the program’s impact included low attendance from participants and broader interpersonal and community obstacles, such as a family’s low socio-economic status and norms around gender and violence.1,2
  • The Samata intervention was implemented as part of the STRIVE consortium at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Karnataka state, India from 2014-2017. This multi-level intervention was designed to address barriers that prevent girls from staying in school and delaying marriage. Barriers include family poverty and gender norms that devalue girls’ education leading to removing daughters from school early, arranging earlier marriages and/or voluntarily dedicating them as sex workers as part of a cultural religious tradition in this setting. Intervention components included establishing safe spaces for girls to meet, academic tutoring for girls, forming boys’ groups to discuss girls’ rights, engaging parents to value education and rethink norms around early marriage, and linking intervention families to government incentives for girls schooling. The intervention also worked with schools to sensitize them to the value of girls’ education and safety and strengthen governance and student tracking systems. The program was evaluated through a randomized control trial which found no difference between rates of school dropout and early marriage for girls in the control and intervention groups. However, a nested qualitative study done midway through the evaluation found parents reported high educational aspirations for their daughters. Concurrent government programs to improve educational outcomes and decrease child marriage in both control and intervention sites limited ability to assess program impact.3–6

This web feature was written by the Institute for Reproductive Health with volunteer experts through the YouthPower2 Learning and Evaluation Gender Community of Practice. Additional content review was provided by colleagues at IRH and UCSD.

This web feature was created by Karin Smith and Anneka Van Scoyoc of the Population Reference Bureau. Charlotte Greenbaum, Raquel Wojnar, and Rachel Yavinsky, all of PRB, provided review.

© Institute for Reproductive Health 2022. All Rights Reserved.

Institute for Reproductive Health
Georgetown University

irhinfo@georgetown.edu
202-687-1392

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About Passages

About the Behavior Studies

The Passages Project is a USAID-funded seven-year implementation research project that aims to address a broad range of social norms, at scale, to achieve sustained improvements in family planning (FP), reproductive health (RH), and gender-based violence. Passages seeks to build an evidence base and contribute to the capacity of the global community to strengthen normative environments that support RH and well-being, especially among young people at key life stages transition points, including young adolescents, newly married couples, and first-time parents. As part of this effort, the Passages Project conducted a scoping review of evidence related to social norms affecting adolescents and young adults in low- and middle-income countries.

To conduct the scoping review, Passages Project consortium members first developed consensus around a list of priority behaviors for each of three age groupings: very young adolescents (VYA; 10-14 years); older adolescents (OA; 15-18 years); and young adults (19-25 years). For each of these groups, consortium members outlined behaviors from three broad thematic areas: 1) RH and FP, focusing on puberty for VYA and voluntary use of contraception for OA and young adults; 2) primary and secondary education for VYA and OA; and 3) family violence, focusing on child marriage for VYA and OA, and intimate partner violence for OA and young adults. Experts on adolescent social and behavior change (SBC) were engaged to rank priority behaviors based on criteria including current evidence gaps, their importance to thematic area outcomes, and promise for norms-shifting approaches.

This process resulted in seven priority behavior-age group combinations that were subsequently re-organized in five behavior studies, with some age groupings combined due to lack of specific evidence or lack of disaggregation compatible with Passages’ original groupings. These five behavior studies are:

  • Adolescent education: Ages 10-25; includes very young adolescents, older adolescents and young adults; a majority of the available evidence focused on adolescent girls and young women.
  • Puberty among very young adolescents: Ages 10-14.
  • Voluntary use of contraception among older adolescents and young adults: Ages 15-25; includes groups of young adults such as first-time parents and newly married couples.
  • Intimate partner violence among older adolescents and young adults: Ages 15-25; includes groups of young adults such as first-time parents and newly married couples.
  • Child marriage among very young adolescents and older adolescents: Ages 10-18; includes very young adolescents and older adolescents; a majority of the available evidence focused on very young adolescent girls.

Scoping reviews were conducted for each priority behavior/age grouping combination. This phase reviewed four databases (PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, and PsycINFO) of peer-reviewed literature focusing on literature from 2010 – 2021. Over 5,000 studies were screened, of which 521 met the inclusion criteria in at least one priority behavior/age grouping. After further evaluating each study that met the initial inclusion criteria, Passages selected studies that:

  1. Investigated the influence of specific social norms on the priority behavior and age groupings, and/or how these norms are held in place; and/or
  2. Described or evaluated promising approaches to address or shift these social norms for a given behavior and age grouping.

The resulting literature base for each behavior study was analyzed by Passages project staff and volunteers with expertise in SBC programming for adolescents and young people. Each behavior studies include information on:

  • Social norms relevant to the behavior that emerged from across the literature for the age grouping. These are ‘tagged’ by the identified underlying meta-norms they reflect, using terminology from the Learning Collaborative’s Social Norms Atlas and Passages’ Social Norms Lexicon.
  • Other, non-normative variances that affect the behavior or practice within the age grouping.
  • Influential reference groups. In reporting findings, there are differences in the specificity of naming these influential groups (i.e., religious leaders versus communities at large) that directly reflect the literature.
  • Two selected relevant interventions that described addressing norms related to the priority behavior for the age grouping, or contained a norms-shifting component, regardless of rigorous measurement of this norms-shifting component. Each selected intervention is ‘tagged’ with the identified norms-shifting approaches in their programming, using terminology from the Passages Theory of Change).

 

Literature Gaps

The majority of published literature focuses on investigating the influence of social norms on target behaviors, often finding a strong influence of gender and other social norms on target behaviors. However, many of these studies did not disaggregate or analyze data by age or gender.

It is therefore challenging to understand either the influence of norms on the behaviors and practices of and for young people or how these norms may be shifted– and especially for different and distinct stages of youth. Adolescence, marriage, and first pregnancy are key transitional phases in the life course in which norms are likely different; it is thus vital to disaggregate findings by age or life stage and gender. Few of the studies measured norms rigorously, and many used attitudes as a proxy for norms. For example, many studies used the Gender-Equitable Men (GEM) scale to measure norms, although the scale measures individual attitudes rather than social expectations.

Only a few of the studies reviewed included a definition of social or gender norms, discussed formative work to identify existing norms, or outlined a named framework or their program theory of change. Social norms were conceived in various manners and according to various disciplines, and were not always consistent with the Passages Project’s definition of social norms as “what I think people do and what I think people should or should not do in my community.” It was not common for studies to report the boundaries of the communities (for example, ‘parents of very young adolescents within X region,’ rather than just ‘parents’) within which norms, or proxies, where measured. Nor was it common for studies to explicitly identify reference groups (see the Passages Social Norms Lexicon for full definitions).

Most of the interventions included in the review were multi-component interventions, of which norms-shifting activities were often only a small component of the overall activities. Very few studies evaluated the effect of norms-shifting interventions on target behaviors, and fewer still measured norms or norm changes over time.  Asa a result, it is challenging to attribute behavioral changes to norms-shifting activities. More work is needed to evaluate norms-shifting interventions using valid and reliable social norms measures, measuring norm shifting against a comparison group to better understand the added effect of norms-shifting activities on norms and behaviors.

All said, the review affirmed that promising practices to address youth behavior across these three domains exist. We believe that it is possible, feasible, and important to design and evaluate norms-shifting interventions for adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health behaviors based on understood and accepted definitions, strong formative work to identify norms and meta-norms, and outlining the communities, influencers, and pathways through which norms impact behaviors.