Child Marriage Rights And Choice

This book addresses the issue of agency in relation to child marriage. In international campaigns against child marriage, there is a puzzle of agency: While international human rights institutions celebrate girls’ exercise of their agency not to marry, they do not recognize their agency to marry. Child marriage, usually defined as ‘any formal marriage or informal union where one or both of the parties are under 18 years of age’, is normally considered as forced – which is to say that it is assumed that are not capable of consenting to marriage. This book, however, re-examines this assumption, through a detailed socio-legal examination of child marriage in Indonesia. Eliciting the multiple competing frameworks according to which child marriage takes place, the book considers the complex reasons why children marry. Structural explanations such as lack of opportunities and oppressive social structures are important, but not exhaustive, explanations. Exploring the subjective reasons by listening to children’s perspectives, their stories show that many of them decide to marry for love, desire, to belong to the community, and for new opportunities and hopes. The book, then, demonstrates how the child marriage framework – and, indeed, the human rights framework in general – is constructed on too narrow a vision of human agency: One that cannot but fail to respect and promote the agency of all, regardless of gender, race, religion, and age. This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in the areas of children’s rights, legal anthropology, and socio-legal studies.

Most in the United States likely associate the concept of the child bride with the mores and practices of the distant past. But Nicholas L. Syrett challenges this assumption in his sweeping and sometimes shocking history of youthful marriage in America. Focusing on young women and girls--the most common underage spouses--Syrett tracks the marital history of American minors from the colonial period to the present, chronicling the debates and moral panics related to these unions. Although the frequency of child marriages has declined since the early twentieth century, Syrett reveals that the practice was historically far more widespread in the United States than is commonly thought. It also continues to this day: current estimates indicate that 9 percent of living American women were married before turning eighteen. By examining the legal and social forces that have worked to curtail early marriage in America--including the efforts of women's rights activists, advocates for children's rights, and social workers--Syrett sheds new light on the American public's perceptions of young people marrying and the ways that individuals and communities challenged the complex legalities and cultural norms brought to the fore when underage citizens, by choice or coercion, became husband and wife.

"Updated with an epilogue ..."--P. [4] of cover.

Ending child marriage is not only a moral imperative—it is a strategic imperative that will further critical U.S. foreign policy interests in development, prosperity, stability, and the rule of law.

According to a study conducted by the Tahirih Justice Center, more than 200,000 children under age 18 were married between the years 2000 and 2015 in the United States. Although all states have statutory minimum age requirements for marriage, there are exceptions in some states that allow children as young as eleven years old to marry with the consent of parents or courts. While the parental and judicial consent requirements are intended to protect children, sometimes parents are complicit in the exploitation of the child, and judges are often unwilling or unable to determine whether the marriage is in the child's best interests. In fact, in many cases, young girls who were impregnated in violation of statutory rape laws were encouraged to marry their rapists. In those cases, the parents and courts are not protecting the child; they are legalizing child abuse.The Constitution protects children as well as adults. If minors are legally incapable of giving informed consent to marry, then parental and judicial consent exceptions allow minors to be married without their consent. This Article argues that such marriages violate minors' rights under the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Allowing adults to marry young girls and take advantage of the marriage exception to states' statutory rape laws deprives the girls of the protection that the laws provide to unmarried girls. Furthermore, allowing minors to marry when they lack the maturity to understand or appreciate the consequences of marriage deprives them of their fundamental right to choose whether and who they will marry.In order to protect their constitutional rights, children who are incapable of giving informed consent should never be allowed to marry. While some older minors may be mature enough to make an informed choice about marriage, the Article concludes that states may restrict marriage to those over eighteen years of age. The mature minor's constitutional rights are not violated because the restriction merely delays a minor's ability to exercise their right to marry rather than foreclosing it entirely. If states choose to allow those mature minors to marry, they should take their parens patriae obligation seriously and conduct an evidentiary hearing to verify that the minor is not being forced or coerced into the marriage, and that marriage is in the minor's best interests.

This series reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the field and includes within its scope international law, anthropology, medicine, geopolitics, social psychology and economics.

Bias analysis quantifies the influence of systematic error on an epidemiology study’s estimate of association. The fundamental methods of bias analysis in epi- miology have been well described for decades, yet are seldom applied in published presentations of epidemiologic research. More recent advances in bias analysis, such as probabilistic bias analysis, appear even more rarely. We suspect that there are both supply-side and demand-side explanations for the scarcity of bias analysis. On the demand side, journal reviewers and editors seldom request that authors address systematic error aside from listing them as limitations of their particular study. This listing is often accompanied by explanations for why the limitations should not pose much concern. On the supply side, methods for bias analysis receive little attention in most epidemiology curriculums, are often scattered throughout textbooks or absent from them altogether, and cannot be implemented easily using standard statistical computing software. Our objective in this text is to reduce these supply-side barriers, with the hope that demand for quantitative bias analysis will follow.

An eye-opening, funny, painful, and always truthful in-depth examination of modern relationships, and a wake-up call for single women about getting real about Mr. Right, from the New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. You have a fulfilling job, great friends, and the perfect apartment. So what if you haven’t found “The One” just yet. He’ll come along someday, right? But what if he doesn’t? Or what if Mr. Right had been, well, Mr. Right in Front of You—but you passed him by? Nearing forty and still single, journalist Lori Gottlieb started to wonder: What makes for lasting romantic fulfillment, and are we looking for those qualities when we’re dating? Are we too picky about trivial things that don’t matter, and not picky enough about the often overlooked things that do? In Marry Him, Gottlieb explores an all-too-common dilemma—how to reconcile the desire for a happy marriage with a list of must-haves and deal-breakers so long and complicated that many great guys get misguidedly eliminated. On a quest to find the answer, Gottlieb sets out on her own journey in search of love, discovering wisdom and surprising insights from sociologists and neurobiologists, marital researchers and behavioral economists—as well as single and married men and women of all generations.

Key recommendations -- Methodology -- 1. Background -- 2. Child marriage and government failure to protect girls and women -- 3. Child marriage: a violation of girls' and women's rights -- 4. International legal obligations on child marriage -- 5. Recommendations -- Acknowledgements.