The Bill Starting a New Beginning
Last week on Wednesday, Colombian lawmakers approved the bill to put an end to child marriage in the country. Their success after 17 long years of campaigning along with advocacy groups and eight failed attempts to push the legislation through the executive branches resulted in Colombia becoming one of the 12 Latin American and Carribean nations to completely eradicate child marriage.
After the high-tension, five hour-long debate on Wednesday evening, the proposed bill “They are Girls, Not Wives,” which prohibits marriage before the age of 18 in the country, was passed through the legislature.
With the approval of the bill, Colombia is officially one of the 12 countries out of the 33 in the LAC region that has entirely outlawed marriage among minors following the Dominican Republic in 2021, Mexico in 2019, Puerto Rico in 2018, and Honduras in 2017. The new and definite legislature has ended the country’s 137-year-old legal loophole that allowed children, 14 for girls and 16 for boys, to marry with the condition of parental consent. Moreover with parental consent, girls as young as 12 and boys as young as 14 could marry. Minors who cohabited for more than two years were also deemed to be allowed to marry.
Sandra Ramirez, adviser and representative in Latin America for the advocacy group Equality Now, stated: “Eliminating these exceptions aligns Colombian law with international standards and guarantees the full protection of the rights of girls and adolescents.”
Child marriage involving girls is three times more common than those involving boys. Moreover, there are currently 4.5 million girls and women in Colombia that married as children, one out of four girls being a child bride in the nation. According to UNICEF Data’s Colombia Child Marriage Report (2022), a million of these women had married before the age of 15.
Jennifer Pedraza, the co-author of the proposed bill and congress member of the Colombian center-left Dignity and Commitment Party, expressed her views after the approval of their proposition: “We do not want to continue seeing the systematic violence and sexual exploitation of children. Colombia is making history because, for the first time, we have managed to ban child marriage after trying eight times.” and added, “So it is a great message, not only for Colombia in terms of respect for the rights of boys and girls, but also for the world. Colombian childhood is important, we have to protect it and we have to care for it. So we are very happy that Colombia has just left the shameful list of countries that allow childhood marriage.”
So, which countries constitute the “shameful list of countries that allow childhood marriage?”
Global estimates, like those from UNICEF and Girls Not Brides, often include cases such as Colombia because such loopholes contribute significantly to child marriage prevalence, even if the minimum legal age suggests otherwise. This makes the reported number of countries around 117, Türkiye being one of the countries where the legal framework includes explicit allowances and exceptions to the minimum age of 18.
Türkiye's Constant Battle with Child Marriage
Although the legal age for marriage is 18 in Türkiye; minors can marry at 17 with parental consent. Moreover, “under exceptional circumstances”, marriages for children as young as 16 can occur with a court's approval, which is typically reserved for situations deemed to involve significant hardship or urgency—a notion that was deemed to be greatly exploited among marginalized communities such as Syrian refugees.
However, what poses the greatest threat to the wellbeing of children regarding childhood marriage is religious marriage, also known as “Imam Nikahı.” This union is not legally recognized but is comparatively common in more conservative regions of Türkiye, with the greatest prevalence being in the East. Although there are not concrete age limits for religious marriages and may differ among different communities and individuals involved, common sources have worryingly stated that the age limit for girls would be as low as nine, and twelve for boys.
According to the highly disputed and deemed-to-be-biased database TUIK (Turkish Statistical Institute), The 2023 data set shows that 10.471 girls between the ages of 16 and 17 were married. Although the number of child marriages in Türkiye has gradually decreased in recent years, thousands of children still become brides and mothers every year—similarly to Colombia, with a significant portion of them being under 15. The percentage of girls aged 16-17 who got married was 8.1% in 2009, but this number decreased to 3.8% in 2018. On the other hand, these figures only include official marriages; unofficial marriages are not included in this data. According to the same dataset, in 2020, 8.154 children were born to girls aged 15-17. This number was 9.893 in 2019, 11.191 in 2018, and 15.160 in 2017.
In recent years, there have been many sensational cases of child brides and mothers, which have brought the topic of illegal child marriages back onto the surface again and again and sparked national discussions about its legal and social implications. One of the scandals that shocked the country emerged when H.K.G., daughter of Yusuf Ziya Gümüşel, the founder of the Hiranur Foundation, revealed that she had been married at the age of six through a religious marriage. A legal case on the worrying act was opened after H.K.G filed complaints against her father and her former spouse, leading to widespread outrage.
The statistics covers only a small range of the victims and the unheard screams of children, underscoring the ongoing issue of child marriage in Türkiye-despite efforts to address it through legal reforms and social awareness campaigns by advocacy groups, administrators, and civilians.
Edited By: Ömer Gökce, Yağmur Ece Nisanoğlu