In low-and middle-income countries, one in three girls marry before age 18 whereas one in five girls marry before age 18 in high income countries . It is estimated that, 600 million girls marry before age 18 globally. Thus, child marriage can be a formal or informal union it can be legal or customary it involves marriage before age 18 and can be forced or voluntary. also suggest that child marriage involves any legal or customary union involving a boy or a girl before age 18. The question lingers on what constitutes child marriage? According to the United Nations convention on the rights of the child, child marriage encapsulates any marriage wherein both partners or one partner is below the age of 18, with or without consent. As such, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs has made a call for the elimination of child marriage by the year 2030. Among the international agreements that have led the discourse on age for marriage is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriages Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Internationally, there is consensus that child marriage is an infringement of the rights of a child, disproportionately affecting girls worldwide. When adolescents are denied of SRHR, it predisposes them to a plethora of risky sexual behaviours, social delinquencies and adverse sexual and reproductive health (SRH) outcomes such as adolescent pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV among others. Therefore, in situations where adolescents are denied this right because of policy absence or inconsistencies, it becomes an important social and public health concern that ought to be addressed with expediency. This is against the backdrop that improving adolescents’ SRHR is fundamental to the advancement and guarantee of a crises-free adolescence and productive life later as adults. This provision will empower them to make informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive health.Įnsuring sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) of adolescents are encapsulated in human rights instruments and policies that have been signed, ratified, and adopted by individual states and nations. Thus, the key is to provide accurate, timely, and non-judgmental sexual and reproductive health and rights information to young people irrespective of the prevailing age of consent. However, what is critical is the education of young people about sexual and reproductive health issues and comprehensive sexuality education through advocacy networks at the national and local levels. We argue that aligning the age for sexual consent and marriage is not the solution to the problem. This commentary highlights strategic potential interventions that could help address the identified gaps. In this commentary, we argue that the gap between the legal age of sexual consent and marriage partly accounts for some of the sexual and reproductive health challenges such as intimate partner violence, sexually transmitted infections, adolescent pregnancy, early childbirth, including unsafe abortions among adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa and infringements on their sexual and reproductive health rights. While there seem to be a standard legal age for marriage, the legal age for sexual consent varies in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa and is often lower than the legal age of marriage. Closely knitted to legal age for marriage is the issue of age for sexual consent, which refers to the minimum age at which a person is considered to have the legal capacity to consent to sexual intercourse. Hence, girls who marry before 18 years are considered as victims of child marriage. In most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the legal age of marriage is 18 years. It also threatens freedom from violence, reproductive rights, movement, and the right to consensual marriage. In some states, a "close in age exemption" exists to decriminalize consensual sex between two individuals who are both under the age of consent.Child marriage is a fundamental violation of human rights and a threat to access to education, sexual and reproductive health care, and employment. The legal age of consent varies from 16 to 18 years old from state to state across the United States.
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