Abstract
Child marriage, defined by the United Nations as marriage before the age of 18, is considered a violation of human rights with negative consequences for girls' health. We systematically reviewed existing academic literature and news media to learn what is known about the frequency of child marriage in Canada and its effects on health. Approximately 1% of 15-19-year-olds in Canada were married or in common law unions in 2016. News reports document cases of child marriage among religious minority communities but no nationwide estimates of the frequency of marriage before the age of 18 were identified. Sources consistently show girls are more likely to marry as teens than boys. Information on married teens between 15 and 19 years of age suggests similarities in marriage patterns among this age group in Canada and child marriage practices globally. Further research is needed to measure Canada's progress toward eliminating child marriage.
Highlights
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights defines child marriage as the formal or informal marriage of any person under the age of 18 [1]
In addition to news reports, we identified nine articles published in academic journals, a single report on child marriage in North America published by a non-profit organization [42], and results from the 2016 Canadian Census available online from Statistics Canada (Table 1)
We cannot conclude that these results indicate that early marriage caused unintended early ends to education for these women; it is possible that early marriage was perceived as an alternative pathway to adulthood for some who did not intend or desire to further their schooling
Summary
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights defines child marriage as the formal or informal marriage of any person under the age of 18 [1]. A decade later, the Convention on the Rights of the Child defined a child as any person under the age of 18 and since the proportion of women marrying before that age has been used as a quantifiable indicator of international development [4]. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015, call for the elimination of child marriage by the year 2030 and estimates of the proportion of women who married before the age of 18 are included in annual reports of progress toward that goal [5]
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