The COVID-19 pandemic's damage to education and the economy could reverse decades of progress on child marriage and pregnancy. Sophie Cousins reports.
Up to 2·5 million more girls around the world are at risk of marriage in the next 5 years because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Save the Children has warned.
In its Global Girlhood Report 2020, the charity warned of 2020 being a year of “irreversible setbacks and lost progress” for girls, predicting that 500 000 more girls are at risk of being forced into child marriage this year alone and 1 million more are expected to become pregnant. This increase will bring the total number of child marriages to around 12·5 million in 2020.
Gabrielle Szabo, senior gender policy adviser at Save the Children UK and author of the report, told The Lancet that the pandemic threatened to reverse 25 years of progress on child marriage, fuelled by school closures and economic destitution.
The charity is particularly concerned about the effects of COVID-19 on efforts to end child marriage across south Asia—a region home to countries with high rates of child marriage and large populations. An additional 200 000 girls in south Asia are expected to be forced into marriage this year.
Before the pandemic, India, which accounts for one in three child marriages globally, had become a world leader in working to reduce child marriage, through education and awareness. But a harsh, long lockdown, which was implemented with just a few hours' notice, left millions of daily labourers and migrant workers without any work, pushing millions more into poverty. India's economy contracted by almost 24% last quarter and schools remain closed across the country as tens of thousands of new COVID-19 cases continue to be recorded daily. Millions of families have been forced to consider child marriage to alleviate poverty.
“We are deeply concerned about the impacts of COVID-19 on efforts to end child marriage in India, and across south Asia. An increasing number of children falling into poverty as a result of the pandemic will mean more girls in the poorest households, where rates of child marriage are highest. That will mean more girls at risk of early or forced marriage”, Szabo said.
Michael Brosowski, founder of Blue Dragon Children's Foundation in Vietnam, told The Lancet that the pandemic had led to an increase in child marriage in the country due to school closures during lockdown, but stressed that accurate data were impossible to come by.
“Whether the numbers [of child marriages] are large or small, they are not acceptable”, he said. “We believe that [child marriages have increased] in part because families may have felt they could no longer afford to feed all the family, and it would be better to let their daughters go and move in with the husband's family.”
Brosowski said that Vietnamese Government officials were to an extent limited in what they could do to help because no official paperwork exists for child marriages. However, he stressed that simple interventions such as home visits could serve as important protection against child marriage. On a larger scale, in addition to education on why child marriage is harmful to children's development, providing families with financial support and economic opportunities is crucial.
Szabo echoed Brosowski, stressing that social protection must be made available to help families to meet their needs, so that families do not need to choose between “their daughters marrying or going hungry.”
Save the Children predicts that as many as 10 million children might never return to school because of the pandemic, most of those being girls. Not only will children miss out on attending school, but could also miss out on receiving life-saving comprehensive sex education, putting girls at risk of high-risk adolescent pregnancies. Childbirth is the leading cause of death among girls aged 15–19 years.
Save the Children said that governments around the world had a duty to ensure that girls were able to continue their education during school closures and return to the classroom when it is safe to do so, and that routine health services, particularly sexual and reproductive health care, be available. The closure of such health services during the acute phase of the pandemic has been described as “devastating” for women's and girl's health.
Before the pandemic, very few countries were on track to reach the Sustainable Development Goal of ending child marriage by 2030. The pandemic has raised the question of whether such goals might need to be reworked.
“Child marriage carries a huge human and economic cost…countries already reeling from the pandemic-induced economic crisis cannot afford the cost of up to an additional 2·5 million child marriages in the next 5 years and more than 1 million adolescent pregnancies in the next 12 months alone”, Szabo said.