MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

No progress in Latin America against child marriage

“Early marriage is rare among the wealthiest segments,” the UNICEF report showed

According to the latest UNICEF study on child marriage, Latin America is second only to sub-Saharan Africa as the region of the world where the fight against such a practice has progressed the least in the last 25 years, it was reported.

Of the 640 million women who have been victims of child marriage in the world, the vast majority (45%) are in South Asia, but that region is taking the fastest steps to eradicate it, which is not the case in sub-Saharan Africa (20% of current cases) or in Latin America and the Caribbean (9% of the total).
India currently accounts for one third of all child marriages worldwide; the next third is also dominated by Asian countries (Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Pakistan), but Brazil and Mexico already appear in this third, the latest study showed.

“Latin America has not registered progress in child marriage in the last 25 years and will thus become the region with the second highest level of early marriages by 2030, only surpassed by sub-Saharan Africa,” the UNICEF report highlighted.

“The trends show a persistent divide between rich and poor: early marriage is rare among the wealthiest segments, while it resists change among the poorest,” the document added.

A graph differentiating the evolution between the wealthiest 20% of the population and the poorest shows that in the Latin American case, for the last 25 years child marriage has only gone down for the former, but has gone up for the poor. This rise is only repeated in Africa, both North and South, while, in the rest of the world, the trend is downward, regardless of social class.