Thanks for your considered and thoughtful response, it touched on a lot of thoughts I have had throughout this project.
1. My intuition from the outset of this project that child marriage would be intrinsically bad because it would expose children to unwanted sex and pregnancy. I have tried to leave that intuition to one side as much as possible because I know ideas about gender and adulthood/childhood are pretty culturally entangled.
In saying that, my ideal model of harm would definitely take into account whether someone wanted to get married and psychological wellbeing. Unfortunately, the available data does provide a lot of clarity.I will look into more qualitative data on what girls think about their marriages to address this.
In the meantime, here are some survey results from Erulkar, 2017, who is a researcher at Population Council on this topic (Table 1). You will see that the results change dramatically between the different groups, some marriages being wanted and some being unwanted, arranged and not arranged, when they found out about the marriage, etc. (Erulkar, 2017). Bear in mind that the Tanzania group had the lowest n, and that the sample sizes in general are not that large. Also note that these are pretty much raw results as percentages, no upper or lower limits provided.
Table 1: What girls surveyed think about their marriages (Erulkar, 2017)
one US based study and one small Iranian study showing decreased psychological well-being for girls married before 18
a study from Niger and Ethiopia showing decreased wellbeing for girls married before 16 but not 16-17 (Table 2)
a study from Ghana that found child marriage protected against measures of stress.
In the study from Niger and Ethiopia, it suggests a pattern of decreased psychological wellbeing for girls married at 12, 13, 14 for both countries, and 15 and 16 for Ethiopia (Table 2)(John et al., 2019). However, please note the standard deviation for these approximations is more than 20 points for each. For me this says:
child marriage may be worse the younger you are when you are married
the harms of child marriage are likely to be drastically different depending where its happening
available data has a lot of uncertainty.
Table 2: Psychological well being
How sexual violence is measured
I agree with you that measures of sexual violence do not address all non-consensual sex and this is a harm that should be included in the overall model of harm of child marriage. I will look for some data on surveys about non consensual sex more broadly as part of this project going forward, unfortunately early signs are that this likely has not been measured. Fan and Koski, 2022 note that all 16 studies they considered in their review on this topic either use the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data or word their questions very similarly to ask about sexual violence:
h) physically force you to have sexual intercourse with him when you did not want to?
i) physically force you to perform any other sexual acts you did not want to?
j) force you with threats or in any other way to perform sexual acts you did not want to?
I think there is a pretty strong argument that if you were a child married to an adult and you did not believe they were allowed to say no, you could experience a lot of non-consensual sex without answering yes to any of these questions.
2. Yes I agree it’s incredibly fraught! I will look for more qualitative data on this and provide it in this thread when I have it.
3. I have the same view that child marriage under 15 would likely show to be much more harmful compared to getting married post 15 if it was broadly studied, but this is only my opinion. Hopefully I should be able to run this data myself using the DHS data.
4. Yes, I left out fertility on purpose because there is disagreement about whether reducing fertility is good or bad, and I do not have a firm view on this. I think increasing access to family planning is an even more non-problematically good thing to do regarding fertility. This is what the Maternal Health Initiative is working on in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In this conference recording, Erulkar talks about the potential of delaying child marriage as a way to increase the gaps between generations, as governments in Sub-Saharan Africa are (in her view) struggling to keep up with the number of young people and provide enough services. This is something I have not explored yet.
I do, in general, think that preventing child marriage could have positive socioeconomic outcomes. One of them is if it increased the education of girls. A popular and cheap intervention for child marriage is to fund girls’ education through supplies or paying school fees. Erulkar, 2017 costed providing school supplies at $20 per girl per year. Girls and women increasing education has positive effects on countries’ economic prosperity (World Bank, 2018).
Thank you again for responding so thoughtfully to my post! Also thank you for introducing me to the term ‘non-problematically’! Very useful in this space where pretty much everything is somewhat problematic.
Thanks so much for this really thoughtful response!
I appreciate how carefully you’ve reviewed the data, and how open-mindedly you’re approaching this issue. I think your assessments largely seem reasonable, but we might diverge here:
My intuition from the outset of this project that child marriage would be intrinsically bad because it would expose children to unwanted sex and pregnancy. I have tried to leave that intuition to one side as much as possible because I know ideas about gender and adulthood/childhood are pretty culturally entangled.
I agree that ideas about gender and adulthood (and marriage, the value of tradition, etc) are informed by our cultures, personal experiences, political views, and so on. And when it’s possible to study an issue rigorously and reach meaningful results without relying on priors, we should do so. My worry here is that we’ve both identified challenges inherent to researching this issue (e.g., that many girls who are having non-consensual sex will not screen positive on existing surveys). Given this, I think it’d be a mistake to draw conclusions solely on the basis of existing data. In my view, we have many independent reasons to think child marriage is bad and not a lot of reasons to think it is good, and the data doesn’t move me much in this regard (i.e., I’m not being confronted with a lot of information that makes me think child marriage is good; it seems like most existing data suggests it is bad or unclear).
I’m also struck by the differences between Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and Tanzania in the table you shared (e.g., 76% of girls in Ethiopia did not want to get married, and 75% of girls in Tanzania did!). This makes me think that child marriage might be a much more important cause in some places than in others, which would be consistent with other GHD initiatives, for which there is often substantial variation in cost-effectiveness for the same kind of program across contexts. Thank you again for all of your work on this!
I think you make a really good point that our priors should lead us to seek out missing data points to either confirm or dispute these priors. This is a really useful meta-conclusion for this project, thank you for highlighting it.
Yes the differences are striking, also a lot of the data I have looked at so far is in Sub-Saharan Africa, where there is already a lot of diversity in findings, but the legal and cultural landscape in South Asia is also completely different and I contains a lot of diversity also. As you say, I think this is more than a question of ITN for child marriage but ITN for child marriage in x place, knowing that the levels of harm, how common child marriage is, and how tractable it is are likely to vary greatly.
Thanks again for your engagement, it’s really helped my thinking!
Hi Lily,
Thanks for your considered and thoughtful response, it touched on a lot of thoughts I have had throughout this project.
1. My intuition from the outset of this project that child marriage would be intrinsically bad because it would expose children to unwanted sex and pregnancy. I have tried to leave that intuition to one side as much as possible because I know ideas about gender and adulthood/childhood are pretty culturally entangled.
In saying that, my ideal model of harm would definitely take into account whether someone wanted to get married and psychological wellbeing. Unfortunately, the available data does provide a lot of clarity.I will look into more qualitative data on what girls think about their marriages to address this.
In the meantime, here are some survey results from Erulkar, 2017, who is a researcher at Population Council on this topic (Table 1). You will see that the results change dramatically between the different groups, some marriages being wanted and some being unwanted, arranged and not arranged, when they found out about the marriage, etc. (Erulkar, 2017). Bear in mind that the Tanzania group had the lowest n, and that the sample sizes in general are not that large. Also note that these are pretty much raw results as percentages, no upper or lower limits provided.
Table 1: What girls surveyed think about their marriages (Erulkar, 2017)
Psychological wellbeing
Fan and Koski, 2022 summarise the data on psychological wellbeing as:
one US based study and one small Iranian study showing decreased psychological well-being for girls married before 18
a study from Niger and Ethiopia showing decreased wellbeing for girls married before 16 but not 16-17 (Table 2)
a study from Ghana that found child marriage protected against measures of stress.
In the study from Niger and Ethiopia, it suggests a pattern of decreased psychological wellbeing for girls married at 12, 13, 14 for both countries, and 15 and 16 for Ethiopia (Table 2)(John et al., 2019). However, please note the standard deviation for these approximations is more than 20 points for each. For me this says:
child marriage may be worse the younger you are when you are married
the harms of child marriage are likely to be drastically different depending where its happening
available data has a lot of uncertainty.
Table 2: Psychological well being
How sexual violence is measured
I agree with you that measures of sexual violence do not address all non-consensual sex and this is a harm that should be included in the overall model of harm of child marriage. I will look for some data on surveys about non consensual sex more broadly as part of this project going forward, unfortunately early signs are that this likely has not been measured. Fan and Koski, 2022 note that all 16 studies they considered in their review on this topic either use the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data or word their questions very similarly to ask about sexual violence:
h) physically force you to have sexual intercourse with him when you did not want to?
i) physically force you to perform any other sexual acts you did not want to?
j) force you with threats or in any other way to perform sexual acts you did not want to?
I think there is a pretty strong argument that if you were a child married to an adult and you did not believe they were allowed to say no, you could experience a lot of non-consensual sex without answering yes to any of these questions.
2. Yes I agree it’s incredibly fraught! I will look for more qualitative data on this and provide it in this thread when I have it.
3. I have the same view that child marriage under 15 would likely show to be much more harmful compared to getting married post 15 if it was broadly studied, but this is only my opinion. Hopefully I should be able to run this data myself using the DHS data.
4. Yes, I left out fertility on purpose because there is disagreement about whether reducing fertility is good or bad, and I do not have a firm view on this. I think increasing access to family planning is an even more non-problematically good thing to do regarding fertility. This is what the Maternal Health Initiative is working on in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In this conference recording, Erulkar talks about the potential of delaying child marriage as a way to increase the gaps between generations, as governments in Sub-Saharan Africa are (in her view) struggling to keep up with the number of young people and provide enough services. This is something I have not explored yet.
I do, in general, think that preventing child marriage could have positive socioeconomic outcomes. One of them is if it increased the education of girls. A popular and cheap intervention for child marriage is to fund girls’ education through supplies or paying school fees. Erulkar, 2017 costed providing school supplies at $20 per girl per year. Girls and women increasing education has positive effects on countries’ economic prosperity (World Bank, 2018).
Thank you again for responding so thoughtfully to my post! Also thank you for introducing me to the term ‘non-problematically’! Very useful in this space where pretty much everything is somewhat problematic.
Thanks so much for this really thoughtful response!
I appreciate how carefully you’ve reviewed the data, and how open-mindedly you’re approaching this issue. I think your assessments largely seem reasonable, but we might diverge here:
I agree that ideas about gender and adulthood (and marriage, the value of tradition, etc) are informed by our cultures, personal experiences, political views, and so on. And when it’s possible to study an issue rigorously and reach meaningful results without relying on priors, we should do so. My worry here is that we’ve both identified challenges inherent to researching this issue (e.g., that many girls who are having non-consensual sex will not screen positive on existing surveys). Given this, I think it’d be a mistake to draw conclusions solely on the basis of existing data. In my view, we have many independent reasons to think child marriage is bad and not a lot of reasons to think it is good, and the data doesn’t move me much in this regard (i.e., I’m not being confronted with a lot of information that makes me think child marriage is good; it seems like most existing data suggests it is bad or unclear).
I’m also struck by the differences between Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and Tanzania in the table you shared (e.g., 76% of girls in Ethiopia did not want to get married, and 75% of girls in Tanzania did!). This makes me think that child marriage might be a much more important cause in some places than in others, which would be consistent with other GHD initiatives, for which there is often substantial variation in cost-effectiveness for the same kind of program across contexts. Thank you again for all of your work on this!
I think you make a really good point that our priors should lead us to seek out missing data points to either confirm or dispute these priors. This is a really useful meta-conclusion for this project, thank you for highlighting it.
Yes the differences are striking, also a lot of the data I have looked at so far is in Sub-Saharan Africa, where there is already a lot of diversity in findings, but the legal and cultural landscape in South Asia is also completely different and I contains a lot of diversity also. As you say, I think this is more than a question of ITN for child marriage but ITN for child marriage in x place, knowing that the levels of harm, how common child marriage is, and how tractable it is are likely to vary greatly.
Thanks again for your engagement, it’s really helped my thinking!