UNITED STATES — Child marriages are declining — but at a rate that would not eliminate the practice for another 300 years, while a perfect storm of crises could yet reverse the trend, the United Nations childrens' agency said Tuesday (May 2).
"We definitely have made progress in the abandonment of the practice of child marriage, particularly in the last 10 years. Unfortunately, this progress was not enough," Ms Claudia Cappa, lead author of the Unicef report published Tuesday, told AFP.
But over the past 25 years the rate at which such marriages take place has been slowing: in 1997, 25 per cent of young women aged 20 to 24 were married before 18. By 2012 that figure had dropped to 23 per cent, and by 2022 it was at 19 per cent."At current pace, we might have to wait 300 years to eliminate child marriage," Ms Cappa warned, adding that the majority of these marriages involve girls aged 12 to 17.
Covid-19 alone could be responsible for an additional 10 million underage marriages between 2020 and 2030, it said. However, the region still accounts for about 45 per cent of the 640 million women today who were married as children. India alone accounts for a third.
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