Twelve million girls become child brides annually, U.N. estimates
The U.N. General Assembly on September 4 adopted a resolution establishing November 27 as the International Day to End Child, Early and Forced Marriage, advancing a global campaign to end the practice by 2030. The vote came as U.S. lawmakers prepared for fall debate on a federal bill that would set the minimum marriage age at 18 nationwide.
The Child Marriage Prevention Act, introduced July 16 by Rep. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin and Sens. Dick Durbin, Brian Schatz and Kirsten Gillibrand, would push states toward a nationwide minimum marriage age of 18 with no exceptions. In announcing the bill, its four congressional cosponsors cited data showing more than 314,000 minors were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2021, including girls as young as 10. The figures, compiled by child-marriage advocacy groups from state marriage records, indicate that most of the underage girls were married to adult men.
“In 34 states, including Wisconsin, child marriage is legal. Many of these marriages are between young girls and adult men. It’s time we end this predatory practice,” Moore said in a statement emailed to NPR.
The U.N. has set a goal of ending child marriage by 2030, framing it as a “human rights violation” that exposes girls to “early pregnancy and social isolation, interrupting her schooling, limiting her opportunities for career and vocational advancement and placing her at risk of domestic violence.” The U.N. estimates that 12 million girls become child brides each year. Child grooms, the U.N. further notes, may be forced into “an adult role for which they are unprepared,” with pressure to drop out of school and support a family.
The bill has won support from many child-marriage advocates, but others have questioned whether its provisions go far enough. Fraidy Reiss, founder of Unchained At Last, a nonprofit working to end forced and child marriage in the U.S., said she was “appalled that two sections of the Child Marriage Prevention Act would make a mockery of the bill’s title.” Reiss said she was forced to marry at age 19.
Section 6 of the bill, Reiss said, would provide federal grants to states to “study” child marriage instead of banning it. “If states are given money to examine something that’s a human rights violation instead of banning it outright, it would be devastating,” she said. Section 10 would allow some minors as young as 16, whether in the United States or abroad, to qualify for a U.S. spousal visa under certain circumstances. Reiss said this provision would encourage “the trafficking of minors to the U.S. under the guise of marriage” and discourage states from setting their marriage age at 18 with no exceptions. “If the bill were amended to set the spousal visa age at 18, it would be a ‘game-changer’ by sending a clear message to states and halting legal trafficking,” she said.
Unchained At Last estimates that at least 66,415 of the marriages documented between 2000 and 2021 — about one in five — occurred when the bride was at an age when sexual relations would be considered a crime, with the age of consent ranging from 14 to 18 depending on the state. In roughly 90% of that subset, according to Reiss, marital exemptions in state statutory-rape laws shielded the adult spouse from prosecution. Married minors may also face legal barriers to hiring an attorney, filing for divorce or obtaining protection from abuse.
Casey Carter Swegman, director of public policy at the Tahirih Justice Center, said a child’s apparent consent does not necessarily mean the decision to marry was made freely. “A 15-, 16- or 17-year-old who has been pressured and coached by family members may tell a judge that she consents because refusing could expose her to punishment or violence at home,” she said. Pregnancy, Swegman added, is treated as potential evidence of sexual abuse, and this is “especially troubling” when it is used as justification for allowing the marriage to proceed. “A child is coming before your court pregnant by an adult person — that should be a red flag for statutory rape, not a green light for marriage,” she said.
“The one thing we hear all the time from places — Cameroon, Guatemala, you name it — is: ‘It makes my work harder when a politician can say to my face, the United States allows child marriage, so why should I do anything?’ The best thing that we can do to help the global movement is to get our house in order,” Swegman said.
Some U.S. lawmakers have opposed both the federal bill and state bans on child marriage. In a 2024 interview with the Missouri Independent, Republican state Rep. Dean Van Schoiack of Missouri called a proposed state ban “government intrusion in people’s lives.” Asked what would be lost if 16- and 17-year-olds could no longer marry, he replied, “Liberties that people currently have.” Similar opposition has emerged in Oklahoma, NPR reported.
As Congress prepares to debate the bill this fall, other countries have adopted more sweeping national restrictions. The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2024 in Sierra Leone sets 18 as the minimum age of marriage without any exceptions for parental consent, religious marriage or pregnancy. Section 15 declares any child marriage contracted after the act took effect to be void, and the legislation penalizes people who facilitate or attend a child marriage. In November 2024, Colombia — where 23% of girls are married before they turn 18 — passed a law banning such marriages outright. On Sept. 25, 2025, Bolivia banned child marriage without exceptions, removing provisions allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to marry with parental consent or judicial approval.
Laws alone have not ended the practice. In India, marriage under age 18 is illegal, yet the latest National Family Health Survey found that one in five women ages 20 to 24 married before turning 18. UNICEF estimates that at least 1.5 million girls under 18 are married in India each year.
“In countries like India, child marriage persists despite strong laws due to deeply ingrained cultural factors, making solutions very complex,” said Renu Singh, executive director of Young Lives India, a research program that studies how poverty and inequality shape children’s lives. Young Lives has followed 3,000 children in the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana since 2002, from childhood into their late 20s. Working with India’s National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, the researchers analyzed 2011 Census data and identified 12.1 million marriages involving people below India’s respective legal marriage ages — 21 for boys and 18 for girls.
“We found that there were so many varied and complex reasons driving these marriages,” Singh said. “It wasn’t just low-income groups who got their children married off.” Some parents who were deeply concerned about the safety of an unmarried daughter saw marriage as a security net, Singh said. Girls with older brothers were more at risk of being married early because of the social custom of giving dowries — when the bride’s family gifts the bridegroom’s family money at the time of marriage. In a household with a boy and a girl, the girl was married especially early, so that her older brother could get married too. “Boys were often married off early as well, especially if the family wanted to get dowries for their sons to offset the financial losses they faced when they gave their own daughters away in marriage,” Singh said. “And this was the case across all income groups.”
India’s national law has helped establish that child marriage is unacceptable and punishable, Singh said, but lasting change also requires communities to stop accepting the practice. Swegman pointed to similar dynamics in the United States. “The U.S. also has major issues with deeply entrenched gender roles, with patriarchy, with extreme — I would say almost obsession over the control of female sexuality,” she said. “These are the [reasons] the social pressure for this practice continue.”
Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer and founder of Just Rights for Children, a child rights network, was a key figure behind the U.N. resolution. His organization has filed 60 Public Interest Litigations in India that would reframe child marriage as child rape, securing legal protections for the young women. “Establishing an official International Day to End Child, Early and Forced Marriage gives us an annual platform to hold governments accountable and enforce laws that protect children,” Ribhu said. “Now is the time to build on this commitment and end child marriage by 2030. Today, the world has spoken in one voice: the crime of child marriage must end.”