An Urgent Call for Collective Advocacy Against Child Marriage: Advancing Adolescent Girls’ Rights and Health

Abstract

Child marriage remains a major threat to adolescent girls’ health, development, and rights worldwide. Despite decades of progress, recent policy backsliding and sociopolitical instability have created new risks, with examples from Iraq, Afghanistan, and The Gambia illustrating how legal and political shifts are reshaping vulnerabilities for girls. This paper presents an integrated framework linking developmental science with legal and policy advocacy, emphasizing how evolving capacities and psychosocial maturity should inform marriage laws and protection mechanisms. It reframes advocacy and rights-based action as essential components of adolescent health systems, drawing on recent policy analyses and country examples to identify actionable, multisectoral strategies. The paper highlights an urgent need for collective, evidence-informed advocacy to protect adolescent girls and advance gender equality, an issue of growing importance amid renewed global attention to legal reforms on child marriage.

1. Introduction

In recent years, the rights of adolescent girls and young women have been increasingly challenged on a global scale, leading to adverse impacts on their physical and mental health. This regression is increasingly obscured by political rhetoric or justified through cultural relativism, yet the lived experiences of girls provide a stark contrast. One of the most pervasive and harmful manifestations of this inequality is child marriage, defined as any marriage or union occurring before the age of 18.

Child, early, and forced marriages and unions (CEFMU), which have directly affected 640 million women and girls alive today and affect 12 million additional girls each year, are well-documented as global public health and social challenges, negatively impacting sexual and reproductive health, mental health, educational outcomes, and socioeconomic status in contexts worldwide [1,2]. While UN agreements (e.g., the Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriage and the Convention on the Rights of the Child) use the terminology of CEFMU or “child marriage,” it is important to recognize that some communities avoid the term “child marriage” in favor of “early marriage” due to social norms that prevent the terms “child” and “marriage” from being used in conjunction [3,4].

All countries have committed to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include a specific target (5.3) to end CEFMU by 2030 because of its recognized and persistent harms. Framing CEFMU, referred to hereafter as “child marriage” for clarity, as both a global public health crisis disproportionately impacting adolescent girls and young women and a pervasive manifestation of gender inequality demonstrates that it is a critical entry point into understanding systemic threats to girls’ rights and underscores the urgent need for coordinated advocacy.

We, as adolescent health experts and advocates, are deeply concerned that without an urgent, collective, and coordinated response to protecting girls’ rights, the health and well-being of young people will be compromised for generations to come.

2. Laws, Consent, and Developmental Science

Despite international agreements setting the minimum age of marriage to 18 years through the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in 1994 and the Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2004, there are at least 44 countries that lack national legislation setting a legal minimum age of marriage [5,6]. Many of these countries are low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where there is renewed momentum on pushes to ban child marriage [7]. Yet concerns on laws preventing and impacting child marriage extend beyond LMICs. In North America and Europe, countries such as the United States and France lack a national minimum age for marriage, often facing opposition to implementing such laws, thereby permitting child marriage to continue legally [6].

Globally, age boundaries surrounding legal marriage are more fluid, and it is increasingly recognized that laws can have negative consequences for girls and their communities if not formulated intentionally, prompting policymakers to consult developmental science for guidance [5]. There is a growing movement advocating for the principle of “evolving capacities” in laws, acknowledging that child and adolescent development, relationships with adults, and decision-making abilities evolve over time [5,8]. However, different legal matters necessitate varying levels of decision-making capacity, as the stages of psychological and cognitive development relevant to consent to medication, for example, differ from those pertinent to marriage [9]. Different stages of development create space for additional individual skills, competencies, and capabilities [9]. Cognitive functioning reaches adult levels around 15–16 years of age, which is crucial for decision-making capacity; however, psychosocial maturity is not fully realized until an individual’s 20s. Thus, employing multiple legal age boundaries aligns with developmental science.

Moreover, discrepancies between laws concerning the age of marriage and the age of sexual consent indicate that scientific evidence does not always underpin these guidelines [10]. In the United States, nearly 300,000 individuals under 18 were legally married between 2000 and 2018, with 80% of these marriages involving girls wed to adult males [11]. Without a federal mandate, only 13 states and territories have established minimum age laws for marriage at 18 without exceptions. Most child marriages in the U.S. involve minors ages 16 or 17, yet legal records reveal instances of marriages involving children as young as 10 years old. Conversely, statutory rape laws designed to protect minors from predatory relationships set a minimum age for consent to sexual activity, which should render sexual activity within child marriages in 14 states as rape, subject to legal penalties [12].

Although laws alone are unlikely to end child marriage, they remain an important complement to interventions that target the root causes of child marriage through shaping environments where girls’ rights are upheld.

3. Global Backsliding and Advocacy Responses

Several recent developments have threatened progress and infringe upon girls’ rights with regards to laws preventing child marriage, yet demonstrate the opportunity for collective advocacy when exerted at multiple levels.

In Iraq, the parliament passed a law in January 2025 amending the 1959 Personal Status Law, which lowered the marriage age for boys from 18 to 15 years and for girls from 18 to as young as 9 years [13]. In February 2025, Iraq’s Supreme Court suspended the recent legislation allowing child marriage, a decision hailed by activists as a significant step in safeguarding girls’ and women’s rights [14]. This reversal underscores how coordinated advocacy by activists, legal experts, and women’s rights and feminist movement organizations can counteract regressive policies, even in restrictive political environments.

In Afghanistan, under Taliban rule, over 1.4 million girls have been denied access to secondary education, contributing to a total of 2.5 million girls, or 80% of Afghan school-age girls, being out of school [15]. Secondary education is recognized as one of the most effective tools for preventing child marriage, with each additional year of secondary schooling associated with a 7% reduction in the likelihood of marrying before the age of 18 [16]. Although new policies create pressures that reinforce the structural drivers of child marriage, stories of resistance from Afghan girls and women’s movements illustrate the power and potential of collective advocacy at the most local levels [17].

In the Gambia, the National Assembly proposed overturning the existing ban on female genital mutilation (FGM), a harmful practice intricately linked to child marriage, in 2024. More than 70% of girls and women aged 15 to 49 in the Gambia report undergoing FGM, often before the age of 5 [18]. Concerns that a reversal of this ban would further erode rights for a larger proportion of girls led to successful advocacy from victims and survivors, civil society organizations, women’s movements, and faith leaders, resulting in the maintenance of the ban on FGM, a ban celebrated by women’s rights and ending child marriage activists worldwide.

4. Implications for Advocacy and Health

These instances underscore the importance of developmental science in guiding laws, the opportunities for advocacy efforts at multiple levels, and critical roles that healthcare and service providers, researchers, and policymakers can play in addressing adolescent health and gender equality through ending child marriage [19]. Whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Gambia, we are reminded that effective advocacy can come from multiple voices and, when an intersectional lens is applied that connects child marriage to root causes like social and gender norms or poverty, decision makers and influencers can be blocked from doing harm or encouraged to do the right thing.

Investing in understanding the impact of laws and policies on girls’ lives is crucial, as these factors exist within a broader ecosystem that can either mitigate or exacerbate the circumstances for child marriage. Across various regions of the world, married girls face systemic barriers to education, healthcare, bodily autonomy, and protection from violence. Key research must incorporate the lived experiences of those directly affected by decisions regarding age boundaries, including the voices of girls and young women, as well as victims and survivors of child marriage, and civil society, community-based organizations, and local leaders and influencers advocating for girls’ health and rights.

The urgency of protecting and ensuring the rights of girls, and creating space for them to demand their own rights, is intensifying globally. Despite decades of progress, earlier gains are being undermined by the deteriorating multilateral system and a series of compounding global crises ranging from climate change and pandemics to conflict zones and rising rates of non-communicable diseases, including mental health issues. These pressures challenge healthcare systems and threaten the rights and well-being of young people, particularly girls.

To be clear, being a vocal opponent to the increasingly conservative movement is not without individual risk. Yet coordinated advocacy from multiple voices and positions in a community, as we propose, distributes that risk. Moreover, recent evidence highlights that the lack of investment in community-rooted advocacy aimed at ending child marriage, gender-based violence, and advancing gender equality, such as through women’s rights organizations and feminist movements, poses broader risks to achieving the outcomes girls and women deserve [20].

5. Conclusions and the Way Forward

The global community is witnessing a coordinated rollback of hard-won rights of adolescent girls and young women in various regions of the world, exacerbated by disinformation, conservative pushback, and reductions in gender justice funding. The persistence and threat of reduced legal protections preventing child marriage remains a timely and often overlooked example. Reliable, developmentally informed science is essential, particularly at a time when younger generations are expressing growing skepticism toward gender equality.

Developmental science has greatly evolved over the past two decades, increasing our confidence that its application will have positive impact on the rights and health of young people. As an interdisciplinary field, developmental science has promoted comprehensive ways of understanding adolescents, providing nuance in defining puberty and further recognizing that biological processes are embedded and shaped within social structures [21]. It has even informed a shift in how the duration of the adolescent period is understood, in recognition of the biological and social maturation that occurs during this life stage, now recognized as spanning ages 10–24 years rather than the previously defined 10–19 years [22,23]. Within the example of ending child marriage, there is more known than ever before about its drivers and consequences, as well as the complexity of response across contexts, making a need to act clear [24,25].

In this global political environment, it is crucial that a range of actors—including healthcare professionals, researchers, policymakers, civil society, and young people—use their platforms and positions of privilege to advocate collectively for evidence-based solutions that advance the rights of adolescent girls and young women globally, ensuring that their voices are heard and their rights are upheld. Moreover, adolescent health experts and advocates must move beyond generating research alone and ensure that it is intentionally framed, communicated, and mobilized to positively influence the laws, policies, and practices that shape adolescents’ lives.