Abstract
For girls and women, marriage under 18 years is commonplace in many low-income nations today and was culturally widespread historically. Global health campaigns refer to marriage below this threshold as ‘child marriage’ and increasingly aim for its universal eradication, citing its apparent negative wellbeing consequences. Here, we outline and evaluate four alternative hypotheses for the persistence of early marriage, despite its associations with poor wellbeing, arising from the theoretical framework of human behavioral ecology. First, early marriage may be adaptive (e.g., it maximizes reproductive success), even if detrimental to wellbeing, when life expectancy is short. Second, parent–offspring conflict may explain early marriage, with parents profiting economically at the expense of their daughter’s best interests. Third, early marriage may be explained by intergenerational conflict, whereby girls marry young to emancipate themselves from continued labor within natal households. Finally, both daughters and parents from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds favor early marriage as a ‘best of a bad job strategy’ when it represents the best option given a lack of feasible alternatives. The explanatory power of each hypothesis is context-dependent, highlighting the complex drivers of life history transitions and reinforcing the need for context-specific policies addressing the vulnerabilities of adolescence worldwide.
Highlights
Marriages taking place in the period between puberty and adulthood, i.e., ‘adolescence’, for girls are currently legal in almost all countries and were historically ubiquitous, including in the global north (Dahl 2010; Arthur et al 2018)
As such, marrying is sometimes seen as the best option and/or a strategic tool with which to address hardships and constraints, making it effectively the optimal choice within the constraints of local context. This logic is reflected in a number of recent qualitative studies that tease apart rationales for early marriage: in Brazil girls often attempt to delay marriage but ‘give in’ when things are going badly within their home (Taylor et al 2015); in Kenya parents prefer for their daughters to delay marriage in favor of higher education, but when financial constrains make education unobtainable, marriage is seen as the best way to secure their daughter’s economic wellbeing via the formation of advantageous alliances (Archambault 2011); and in Tanzania, girls and their parents weigh marriage against risks of school attendance, including rape and physical abuse, sometimes finding marriage to be the more desirable option (Schaffnit et al 2020)
human behavioral ecology (HBE) can provide a framework for analysis here too; scholars working in this tradition have long considered the socioecological and evolutionary roots of patriarchy, often placing emphasis on the role of livelihood shifts, such as the uptake of agriculture and its impacts on gendered divisions of labor and resource control, along with variation in post-marital residence norms that may influence a woman’s ability to draw on support from kin when facing a conflict of interest with men and patrilineal relatives (Hrdy 1997; Smuts 1995; Borgerhoff Mulder and Rauch 2009; Lawson et al 2021). These considerations leave us with a more nuanced perspective on early marriage, highlighting that marrying early can be indicative of and perpetuate patriarchal structures that restrict women’s agency and yet, given that a woman lives within this system, participating in an early marriage may present the best available option. In evaluating these four HBE-grounded hypotheses for the persistence of early marriage, we have identified that explanations are context-dependent (Table 2)
Summary
Marriages taking place in the period between puberty and adulthood, i.e., ‘adolescence’, for girls are currently legal in almost all countries and were historically ubiquitous, including in the global north (Dahl 2010; Arthur et al 2018). HBE has the potential to strengthen global health responses to the vulnerabilities of adolescence by identifying key socioecological features driving variations in behavior and wellbeing To this end, we consider four main explanations for early marriage grounded in HBE, drawing out predictions about which socioecological conditions may make each explanation most relevant. We consider the possibilities that early marriage is the result of (1) adaptation to low life expectancy, despite reducing wellbeing; (2) parents winning a parent–offspring conflict in which parents benefit from girls early marriages at cost to their daughter; (3) daughters winning an intergenerational conflict in which daughters benefit from earlier marriages than their caregivers prefer; or (4) a ‘best of a bad job’ strategy whereby early marriage presents the best available option for daughters and parents alike in the face of a highly constrained environment These explanations are not necessarily in conflict with common explanations for child marriage arising from global health. This framework can help push forward research related to wellbeing, and in some cases be used to derive novel policy recommendations, including the design of interventions and impact evaluations (Gibson and Lawson 2015; Schaffnit et al 2020)
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