Is the United States Doing Enough to End Child Marriage?

Friday was International Day of the Girl Child, established in 2012 to honor and observe the rights of girls everywhere, who represent the hope and future of their families, communities and nations, yet face countless rights violations such as violence and harassment, female genital mutilation and child marriage, which claims 15 million girls each year in the developing world.
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Today is the International Day of the Girl Child, established in 2012 to honor and observe the rights of girls everywhere, who represent the hope and future of their families, communities and nations, yet face countless rights violations such as violence and harassment, female genital mutilation and child marriage, which claims 15 million girls each year in the developing world.

This is an issue that the United States has increasingly taken up in its foreign policy and assistance. Most recently the United States became the first country in the world to pen a Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls (much of which is based on research by the International Center for Research on Women). While Sweden gets a lot of attention for its "feminist foreign policy," this is the first time any government -- much less a global superpower -- has put forward a foreign policy marshalling the talent and treasure of more than four agencies towards protecting the rights of and opening opportunities for adolescent girls. And long before that, the United States Agency for International Development, put forward a Vision for Action what was needed to end child marriage through its work. (USAID has subsequently led the government in efforts to address the "how" question by commissioning guidance -- also by ICRW -- on how its bureaus and missions worldwide can integrate child marriage prevention and response into programs on education, health and democratic governance, among others).

None of these policies has been codified by Congress, but it is important to note that it is not only the democratic Obama Administration that has led for girls of late. Last month, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Transnational Crime, Civilian Security and Global Women's Issues, and Ranking Member Barbara Boxer (D-CA) convened a hearing on "Protecting Girls: Global Efforts to End Child Marriage," with opening remarks from Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), a long-time Senate champion on the issue.

The hearing is the second in a recent series examining the tremendous human rights abuses adolescent girls face around the world and examining what the United States has done or could do better to address them. (The first tackled the issue of girls' education, an area of increasing U.S. attention under the Obamas' Let Girls Learn and other programs.) This is a new and worthy area of leadership for the Chairman, a father of two girls, who called the hearing, in his words, to call attention to an issue that affects 15 million girls each year in the developing world, and to investigate what the United States is doing, and whether it is sufficient.

In his powerful opening statement he pointed to the myriad causes of this harmful practice, including gender inequality and social norms that do not value girls equally with boys, economic factors that make families feel they cannot afford to feed or educate their daughters, parental concerns that if they don't marry their daughters early, they will be subjected to violence or rape, especially in times of conflict and insecurity -- as we have recently seen with nearly tripling rates of child marriage among Syrian refugees. As the Chairman rightly said, "these statistics are particularly sobering as each number represents a girl denied the opportunity to live up to her God-given potential. It represents a bride whose wedding day is not a celebration but rather a memorial as she marks what can only be described as the death of her childhood."

And as early as 2010, Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Susan Collins (R-ME) and Representatives Betty McCollum (D-MN) and Aaron Schock (R-IL) developed legislation mandating that ending child marriage should be a priority for U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. Protecting Girls by Ending Child Marriage Act, the major provisions of which were eventually wrapped into the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act and are now enshrined in U.S. law.

That's the good news -- there is a very strong policy foundation from which to build real and transformative progress on the issue. However, as is so often the case, real investment in the kinds of programs that have been proven to delay marriage and empower girls with the ability to choose if, when and whom to marry has not kept pace with rhetorical attention to the issue. It has been difficult -- for Members of Congress and advocates alike -- to obtain an accurate picture of how much the Administration is actually spending specifically to address child marriage, but we know whatever's being spent is not nearly enough to address a problem faced by 41,000 girls who will marry today. When we do see spending reports, child marriage funding figures are often double-counted or obscured under investments in larger -- albeit related -- issues like gender equality, health and education, or contain only personal anecdotes of a girl helped by a token program.

The United States did make commitments -- only some of which were new -- at the 2014, United Kingdom-led "Girl Summit," which solicited commitments from governments and civil society actors to end child marriage and female-genital mutilation globally. What has been missing is the feedback loop on what those and other initiatives, such as the many new commitments under Let Girls Learn, are achieving and how much we are spending on them. That is the kind of information that appropriators will need this fall if child marriage hopes to receive any support as they divvy up the pieces of an ever-shrinking pie.

Happily, in his closing remarks Chairman Rubio expressed a commitment to doing just that -- continuing to focus on the issue and linking it to the appropriations process this fall. As he said, "We want to convince leaders that this is not just the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do."

And indeed it is: New research from ICRW and the World Bank suggests there would likely be enormous savings and cost benefits for countries that tackle their child marriage problem. Niger, which leads the world with a child marriage rate of 75 percent, stands to benefit from at least a $25 billion boon in the next 15 years, were it to eliminate child marriage. Surely the converse holds true as well -- for every dollar the United States invests in child marriage prevention, returns on investment can be gained across spending on global health, education, workforce development and more.

Now that's a message that is sure to resonate with appropriators and taxpayers alike.

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