Globally, ten million girls are sold into marriage every single year. That is 25,000 girls per day, with more than one third of all child brides in India.
Source: Graça Machel and Mary Robinson, “Girls Not Brides”, in Minky Worden (ed.) “Unfinished Revolution”, 2012
Child marriage is legal in the U.S., and an estimated 248,000 children as young as 12 were married here between 2000 and 2010.
Source: Unchained at Last
Most states let 16- and 17-year-olds marry if they have parental consent, and several states — including New York, Virginia and Maryland — allow children under 16 to marry with court permission.
Source: Colleen Long, AP News
Between 2007 and 2017, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved 5,556 requests made by adults to bring child and adolescent spouses or fiancees into the United States, and it approved 2,926 requests by minors seeking to bring in older spouses. Requests are approved based on whether the marriage is legal in the spouse or fiancee’s home country and then whether the marriage would be legal in the state where the petitioner lives. In nearly all the cases, the children and adolescents were girls. In 149 instances, the adult was older than 40, and in 28 cases the adult was over 50. In 2011, immigration officials approved a 14-year-old’s petition for a 48-year-old spouse in Jamaica. A petition from a 71-year-old man was approved in 2013 for his 17-year-old wife in Guatemala. The country where most requests came from was Mexico, followed by Pakistan, Jordan, the Dominican Republic and Yemen. Middle Eastern nationals had the highest percentage of overall approved petitions.
Source: Colleen Long, AP News
Worldwide there are 51 million girls between 15 and 19 years old who are married.
In West Africa, South Asia, East and Central Africa 30 per cent or more of girls aged 15-19 are already married.
The percentage of girls who are married before age 18 is:
Niger: 82 per cent
Bangladesh: 75 per cent
Nepal: 63 per cent
Cameroon: 62 per cent
India: 57 per cent
Uganda: 50 per cent
The number of girls expected to marry before 18 in the decade after 2003 is 100 million.
Source: Sheila Jeffreys, “The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade”, 2009
In Afghanistan, increased child marriage is the result of the privations suffered through the last decade [2000-2010 decade] of conflict. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission estimates that 57 per cent of marriages involve girls under the legal marriage of of 16.
Source: Sheila Jeffreys, “The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade”, 2009
There has been a rise in temporary marriages in Iraq, which is worrying women’s rights campaigners who say that 300 occur daily in the three main cities in the south of the country, Kerbala, Najaf and Basra, the main Shi’ite cities.
Source: Sheila Jeffreys, “The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade”, 2009
In Russia alone 25,000 women per year sign up to Russia’s at least 600 marriage sites. Only 5-7% of the women who sign up – around 1,500 women per year – eventually find a foreign spouse, according to a study conducted by an American university.
Source: Abigail Stepnitz, “Male-Ordered: The mail-order bride industry and trafficking in women for sexual and labour purposes,” 2009