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= CHILD MARRIAGE IN HUMANITARIAN EMERGENCIES =

Definition
Child marriage is defined as “any formal marriage or informal union where one or both parties are under the age of 18 years old." This practice can often lead to a host of health and economic disadvantages for child bridesand their offspring. Child marriage is pervasive across cultures, and fifty-one countries have a prevalence rate of 25% or greater. Although the practice is on the decline globally, prevalence rates have increased in fragile states (9 of 10 countries with the highest prevalence of child marriage are considered fragile states) and in complex humanitarian emergencies caused by war, disaster or displacement.

The practice of child marriage has adverse impacts on education levels, human rights, and health indicators. These include significant risks of maternal mortality, infant mortality, STDs/HIV, domestic violence, illiteracy, and intergenerational cycles of poverty. Child marriage is of urgent concern right now because over 65 million people are currently displaced worldwide and are uprooted from familiar social structures and safety nets. While child marriage is difficult to address in the context of humanitarian crises, refugee settings, and state collapse, interventions can nonetheless be developed to reduce risks for girls. Humanitarian crises typically limit the ability of states to protect vulnerable populations from the risks of sexual violence, including child marriage. As a result prevention is not adequately prioritized and prevention efforts are often underfunded.

Causes and Impacts
Drivers of child marriage are multi-factorial involving gender inequality, tradition, family and economic pressures.In unstable emergency situations, parents often marry their daughters in a desperate effort to protect them. The inability of families to provide food, shelter, and safety for their girls can lead them to seek early unions especially in the face of hunger or threats of sexual violence or trafficking. For example a study in Nepal found that 91% of food insecure girls were married as children. In refugee settings near Myanmar, Rohingya girls as young as 12 years old are forced into marriage under dire circumstances. In 2014 child marriages comprised 32% of registered marriages among Syrian refugee communities in Jordan, significantly more than 13% pre-war levels of child marriage within Syria. Anecdotal reports from doctors corroborates this phenomenon in other emergency settings. Evidence also suggests that male migrants often seek young brides to bolster their asylum claims. Given child marriage in these settings is largely a response to insecurity,there are preemptive steps host communities (including schools and religious leaders) and supporting international organizations/NGOs can take to advance protection of girls, which are supported by international law.

There are a number of relevant rights laid out in legal frameworks/instruments including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), The Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees , and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Legal and human rights standards reinforce the responsibility of signatories to protect children from early marriage and to support refugee populations in crisis.

One of UNHCR’s mandates is to promote international instruments for the protection of refugees, and supervise their application. The principle of "the best interest of a child" which underpins the CRC emphasizes state parties' responsibility to protect children's right to health, education, employment, development. Article 16 (b) of UDHR specifically states: "Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent", which a child under 18 is unable to provide.Refugees’ basic welfare can be prioritized within camps and other circumstances where they are provided protective status, so families aren’t so desperate that they are forced marry off daughters in a perceived “lesser-of-two-evils” scenario. While these legal instruments can be useful tools for establishing norms and assigning responsibility, a response to the problem of child marriage requires the proactive involvement of diverse sectors including health, social services, child protection and communities affected, according to IASC.

While there is a dearth of research on the subject of child marriage among the displaced, a recent report highlighted many factors in the camps housing refugees in Greece that contributed to insecurity and sexual exploitation of children lead to marriage of girls including: group tents, lack of ability to close/lock entrances to sleeping quarters, lack of lighting, NGO staff departing camps at nightfall, inadequate safe spaces for children, lack of legal accountability, and general failure of child protection systems. Child marriage is on the continuum of sexual exploitation, though it must be handled with sensitivity, given different cultural norms on the subject, despite increasingly universal national laws which prohibit marriage under 18 and global consensus to end the practice by 2030 per the Sustainable Development Goals.

In order to honor the commitments made by international legal frameworks as related to this largely traumatized and particularly vulnerable population, best practices to mitigate risk of security-driven child marriage and other forms of exploitation of children among refugees under the protection of UNHCR and host states, according to an Harvard FXB Center report, include: smaller and  specialized camps for families and women with children; improved security; gender-differentiated sanitation; psycho-social support, positive parenting training and education for children about their rights; identification of high risk families; investment in translators; shorter asylum process and wait times; an end to detention of minors in closed facilities and support  for community-based hosting;  shelters for children at risk of exploitation/marriage; integration into local schools, training of border control personnel to verify legitimacy of familial relationships;  and improved collaboration between stakeholders in data collection, development of guidelines for case management and reporting for NGOs.