Child Brides, Grown Men: Why Won’t the UN Call ‘Child Marriage’ What It Is?

Girls as young as 9 are legally handed to men decades older across dozens of countries. The world’s leading human rights body, along with most governments, still won’t call it rape.Afghanistan offers the most jarring example.Nine years old. That is the age at which girls in parts of Afghanistan can now be legally married off under a decree issued by the Taliban’s de facto authorities this year. Such a policy is so extreme that the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child took the unusual step of publicly condemning it in June, calling Decree No. 18 a grave and systematic violation of international law.What the committee did not do, in that condemnation or in the broader body of UN documentation on the subject, is call the sex and childbearing that follows those unions what advocates and a growing body of researchers say it plainly is: rape.For the girls and women who have lived it, that divergence in language is not academic. It decides whether what happened to them has a name the law will ever recognize. So, why won’t anyone say it?“Because child marriage is deemed a ‘harmful traditional practice,’ framing it that way, marriage itself stands in for consent. Legal loopholes turn what would otherwise be prosecuted as statutory rape into a legally sanctioned marriage instead,” the associate clinical professor of law and director of the Domestic Violence Institute at Northeastern University School of Law, Hayat Bearat, tells The New York Sun. “Naming it rape would mean naming millions of men as rapists and dozens of governments as complicit, a much harder conversation than funding a prevention program.”Yet the math behind the sanitized, celebratory word “marriage” is hard to absorb.The Numbers Behind the EuphemismRoughly 640 million girls and women alive today were married before turning 18, according to UNICEF’s data portal, meaning close to one in 10 women on the planet carries the lasting consequences of a childhood marriage. Another 12 million girls are added every year — one roughly every two and a half seconds.West and Central Africa carries the highest rate, with roughly one in three young women marrying before 18. South Asia’s rate is lower, near one in four; however, its sheer population means it still has more child brides than anywhere else on earth.The United Nations set 2030 as a target deadline to end the practice entirely. But UNICEF’s own analysis says the world would need to move nearly 20 times more quickly than at present to hit it. Others put the real finish line three centuries away.Still, the notion of an old man bedding a prepubescent girl isn’t being framed for what it is and advocates are hoping to change that fact.Niger, the Central African Republic, Chad, Mali, South Sudan, and Bangladesh post some of the highest child marriage rates in the world — each above 50 percent — with Nigeria close behind. Decree No. 18 has now added Afghanistan to that list of the world’s most alarming examples, even though UNICEF’s own data doesn’t include a reliable national prevalence figure.Why The Words Matter More Than They Seem ToEven in the United States, political leaders routinely refer to “marriage” rather than “rape.”Girls who marry as minors in America are wed to adult men an average of four years their senior, more than double the gap seen when boys marry at an early age, according to a study tracking two decades of state marriage records.A study in the Journal of Adolescent Health looked at marriage certificates filed in 44 states from 2000 to 2020. It found that in 33 of those states, the law makes an exception for married couples: Sex that would be a crime between an adult and a minor stops being a crime once the two are married.The researchers behind that study concluded that some of those marriages amount to sex crimes in every way but paperwork, and that it isn’t clear why the ones they found were certified as marriages instead of being prosecuted as something else. In other words, the marriage certificate does the work the courtroom was supposed to do.Ms. Bearat sees the same mechanism from the other direction. “‘Harmful practice’ sends the problem to child-protection agencies — awareness campaigns, schooling. ‘Sexual violence’ sends it to criminal justice and survivor redress. Most U.S. states set a minimum age of consent for sex, then allow child marriage to override it entirely for the same conduct with the same child,” Ms. Bearat tells the Sun.Tahirih Justice Center, which focuses on child marriage inside America, draws a different line: It says the age of sexual consent and age of marriage answer two separate legal questions, and changing one does not automatically change the other.“Many advocates are careful about automatically calling any sex within a child marriage ‘rape,’” the public policy manager at Tahirih Justice Center, Alex Goyette, tells the Sun. He says the center’s position is that no clerk should be able to issue a marriage license to anyone under 18, full stop; whether an adult partner should face statutory rape charges is, in its view, a distinct policy question.Others argue the reluctance runs deeper than legal nuance.“Hypocrisy, ignorance, cowardice?” asks the director of policy and women’s programs at the AHA Foundation, Michele Hanash, pointing to bodies such as the UN Human Rights Council.“You don’t even have to look to other countries to see how child marriage can be used to cover up child rape. Between 2000 and 2021, nearly 315,000 minors were married in the United States, some as young as 10. The vast majority were girls married to adult men.”The numbers sharpen once state law enters the picture, Ms. Hanash tells the Sun. “Between 2000 and 2021, at least 66,415 marriages involved an age or spousal age difference that should have constituted a sex crime,” she says.“In some states, children, overwhelmingly girls, were literally sent home to be raped under state law. In others, marriage functioned as a get-out-of-jail-free card for a child rapist, allowing the state to sanction what would have been rape outside of marriage. When we refuse to call this what it is, we make it easier to ignore and harder to prevent.”Congress has moved on part of that this summer. The Child Marriage Prevention Act of 2026, reintroduced in mid-July by Senators Dick Durbin, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Brian Schatz, along with Representatives Gwen Moore and Raja Krishnamoorthi in the House, would push states to raise their minimum marriage age to 18 with no exceptions and aims to close federal immigration loopholes tied to spousal visas.Seventeen states and Washington, D.C., now ban the practice outright; the other 34 still allow it under conditions such as parental or judicial consent, though California and Ohio have legislation pending that would make them the 18th and 19th to close the gap.Ms. Hanash, however, argues the bill leaves an old problem in place. “At the federal level, Congress should also completely close the immigration loophole that we at AHA identified in 2017, which allows minors to be trafficked to the United States or to a foreign national for their U.S. citizenship under the guise of marriage.The law must leave no loopholes to be exploited,” she says. “Unfortunately, current pending federal legislation fails to do that and leaves a dangerous loophole open.”Not every advocate points to the same fix. Mr. Goyette argues that every jurisdiction in the United States “that has not yet banned child marriage should do so immediately by setting their minimum marriage age at the age of majority, generally 18.”A Crisis Compounded by ConflictNowhere is the pattern moving backward more quickly than in Afghanistan. Decree No. 18, formally titled “Principles of Separation Between Spouses” and approved by the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, ties marriage eligibility to puberty rather than a fixed age and treats a girl’s silence afterward as legal consent.The Committee on the Rights of the Child’s chairwoman, Sophie Kiladze, calls Decree No. 18 a deeply alarming measure that undermines the fundamental rights of children in Afghanistan and challenges international standards outright.Advocates describe a “polycrisis” of armed conflict, climate-driven displacement, and lingering economic strain pushing families toward marrying off daughters earlier as a coping mechanism, even as child marriage globally has seen a slow, uneven decline over the past decade.Across its resolutions, reports, and country reviews, the United Nations has spent decades describing child marriage as a “harmful practice” and a “violation of human rights.” Both phrases are accurate. But neither accounts for what advocates argue is actually happening inside those unions once the ceremony ends, and more data won’t change that. Only a willingness to use the word will.“The word ‘rape’ still feels stark when placed next to ‘marriage,’” the founder of More to Her Story, Sarah Little, tells the Sun. “Historically, marriage was built around the idea that a woman belonged to her husband, and that sex was part of what marriage entitled him to. Even if most human rights groups have moved beyond those ideas, their language hasn’t always caught up.”Ms. Little also points out that “cultural relativism can make institutions hesitant to call gender-based violence what it is, and the fear of sounding intolerant too often takes precedence over protecting girls.”In essence, politeness has a body count.“Child marriage and its consequences are the result of choices families make, and refusing to name them for what they are enables those responsible and shields them from accountability,” Ms. Little observes. “For now, the United Nations’ response continues to run through resolutions, data portals, and calls for member-state input rather than a formal reclassification of the harm.”For Ms. Little, the fix was never complicated. It was just never chosen. “Girls everywhere, across every culture, deserve safety, rights, and autonomy,” she says. “Violence is violence, wherever it happens.”

Child Brides, Grown Men: Why Won’t the UN Call ‘Child Marriage’ What It Is?

Child Brides, Grown Men: Why Won’t the UN Call ‘Child Marriage’ What It Is?

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