The truth the world took too long to admit about child marriage

Some victories hurt. They hurt because they carry such horrifying and heavy truths that you wish were not real. Yet they are. And even when you are on the winning side of the argument, you hurt, at the enormous sadness of the truth.

For instance, when the recent report Accelerating Efforts to End Child Marriage by Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs became public, many working to end child marriage within India’s child rights ecosystem must have felt exactly that. The instinct to say “We knew it all along” was perhaps unavoidable. Yet it was accompanied by a deep and overwhelming sadness about the plight of millions of children across the globe.

What many child rights advocates in India have long argued, that child marriage is not merely a social injustice but a crime that robs children of education, autonomy, and economic future, now finds powerful validation in the report’s analysis. NGO networks such as Just Rights for Children have consistently argued that when a child is forced into marriage, what is taken away is far more than childhood. Education is interrupted. Health risks multiply. The doors to economic independence begin to close.

Child marriage, in that sense, is not simply a social tragedy. It is the systematic theft of a child’s future. A crime against a child, akin to rape. And every three seconds, one child somewhere in the world is being pushed into this dangerous cycle of abuse and neglect even as we talk.

It took the world far too long to acknowledge what many on the ground have been saying all along. When the United Nations warned a few years ago that ending child marriage globally could take as long as 300 years, the prediction reflected a certain resignation. It came from the belief that while child marriage is wrong, it is ultimately a social practice that can be addressed slowly through gradual social change.

But crimes against children cannot be negotiated with culture, nor postponed for centuries. They demand urgency, enforcement, and accountability.

Something India has been increasingly asserting with clarity. From enforcing laws and calling sexual intercourse with a child, irrespective of marital status, rape, to implementing strict laws like POCSO against child abusers and paedophiles, India has refused to treat the crime as either a cultural handicap or a psychological disorder, the latter often used as an excuse in cases involving paedophiles.

Yet laws alone, however strong, cannot end a crime that is embedded in social practice.

What India witnessed in recent years was therefore something larger than legislation. It was a whole of society movement against child marriage. When the Government of India launched the ‘Bal Vivah Mukt Bharat’ campaign across the nation, civil society organisations that had already been working against this crime joined the effort with renewed conviction. The scale of action that followed was unprecedented.

Through coordinated strategies of NGOs working on the ground, their collaboration with administrations, and the involvement of frontline workers such as Anganwadi workers and teachers, the number of child marriages stopped in India in the last one year alone is not in hundreds or even thousands. It is in lakhs. Across districts, NGO networks, local administrations, and government officials have intervened, often in real time, to prevent these marriages from taking place.

It is this kind of coordinated response that the Columbia report now calls for when it recommends collective action to end child marriage globally. In many ways, it echoes the ‘whole of society and whole of nation’ approach that India has been attempting to build.

The report also underlines another reality that the world is slowly beginning to recognise. child marriage is not only a moral and social failure. It is an economic one.

It estimates the global cost of inaction at up to $175 billion per year, or almost $2.5 trillion by 2040, from lost productivity and increased health risks. “The cost of inaction on child marriage far exceeds the amount of funding needed to reduce this practice,” the report notes. Startling as it may sound, that is merely the economics of child marriage.

Citing India’s example, the report observes that countries that demonstrate political will, whether through government commitments made by high-level leaders or through effective advocacy campaigns by civil society, must become focus countries in the global effort to end child marriage.

But the real story is not that India has won an argument, or that the world has finally recognised the scale of the problem.

The real story is that it took us far too long to do so.

Too many years were spent looking the other way.

Often, in the wrong direction.

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