Child Marriage Is Child Rape. Why Has It Been Normalized?

On one occasion in Khost, Afghanistan, several years ago, I sat on the floor sipping tea with brave-faced older women and widows who spoke passionately about the necessity of women teachers and students. One of the women’s small granddaughters, just nine years old, slipped in beside me onto the cool concrete floor with a doll. She said nothing, her innocent, wide-eyed face staring inquisitively into mine.

I learned that this small, freckle-faced girl was already engaged. Her impoverished parents, struggling further under the country’s plunging economy, saw no choice but to give her to a much older man in exchange for quick cash, following the custom in which the bride’s family receives payment.

The wedding would happen after her first period. Her schooling had ended; her choices had disappeared. I think of her often. I hold the question of whether that day has finally come and shudder to think of her life now. Afghanistan’s continued economic crisis is exacerbating this already widespread practice.

I keep coming back to her doll. She was still playing with a doll. And somewhere, a grown man was waiting for her body to catch up to a contract her parents signed for survival money.

Another time, I was talking to a man from the mountains about his family. I casually asked about his wife and her age, and he said he did not know her age and pointed to his chest, describing her as “still flat” when they married.

I have been thinking a lot about this encounter lately, and whether the word we use to describe this practice is too sanitizing and lets too many people off the hook.

What happens between a fifty-year-old man and a nine-year-old girl on a wedding night is rape. It doesn’t matter that her parents put their names on something, or that a religious leader said some words over the two of them beforehand. None of that changes what happens to her body once the door closes.

Yet the celebratory term “marriage” gives everybody a place to put that knowledge down and walk away from it.

Say “rape,” and people flinch. Say “child marriage,” and they nod, because it sounds procedural, almost bureaucratic, like paperwork, not violence.

Roughly 640 to 650 million girls and women alive today were married before they turned 18. That’s not a historical footnote. That is one in every five women on the planet right now, walking around carrying the lifelong consequences of a decision made for her before she’d finished growing. Every year, 12 million more girls are added to that number. Do the math on that, and it comes out to a girl married off roughly every two and a half seconds.

By the time you finish reading this, several more girls somewhere in the world will have become child brides.

The trajectory isn’t improving fast enough to matter. The United Nations’ own target was to end the practice by 2030. Researchers now say the world would need to move twenty times faster than its current pace to hit that goal. At today’s rate, some estimates put full elimination three centuries away. Three hundred years. Girls not yet born will inherit this.

If you want the map of this, start in the Sahel. Niger alone has a child marriage rate north of 76 percent, which is a number I’ve had to read twice myself to believe. Chad, Mali, the Central African Republic, Guinea, Mozambique — all of them sit somewhere above 45 percent, which means in some of these places it would be strange, almost suspicious, for a girl to reach adulthood still unmarried.

Bangladesh isn’t far behind on the other side of the world, and neither are stretches of rural India, Nepal, and Yemen, where I’ve done my own reporting and heard the same justifications recycled almost word for word from one country to the next.

Afghanistan, too, has its own jarring arithmetic: nearly 29 percent of girls under 18 are married, and almost 10 percent are married before they’re even 15.

It would, however, be a comfortable lie to pretend this is only a problem of deserts and famine and far-off villages. Until shockingly recently, most U.S. states allowed minors to marry with parental or judicial consent and no minimum age floor at all. Some still do. This isn’t a practice confined by geography or religion. It’s a practice enabled wherever adults decide a girl’s body is a negotiable asset before it’s a person.

The men buying these marriages are frequently decades older than the girls they’re marrying, and that is often the whole point. I’ve talked to researchers who track bride-price markets across different countries, and they all describe the same pattern: the younger the girl, the more a family can charge for her.

We would call it exactly what it is if it happened in a suburb outside Chicago. Somehow, when it happens in Ghor province or rural Niger, we reach for softer words — “tradition,” “custom,” “cultural practice” — as if geography changes what a child’s body can and cannot consent to.

I think about the girl in Khost a lot. Her doll on the concrete floor. I don’t know if her wedding has happened yet. But I know that somewhere tonight, a girl just like her is being handed over. The word for the man waiting on the other side of that transaction shouldn’t be “husband.” It should be the word we’d use anywhere else for an adult who has sex with a child.

Rapist.

Until we say that without hesitation, in every language, every article and every UN report, we’ll keep calling a crime a custom and keep failing the girls who should be playing barefoot in the summer sunshine.

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