§ 402. FINDINGS.
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“Congress finds the following: According to United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 12,000,000 girls marry before the age of 18 every year. Early marriage denies children, especially girls, their right to make vital decisions about their well-being, including relating to their health, family, and career. Child brides are less likely to finish their education, and are at higher risk for abuse, contracting HIV, and dying while pregnant or giving birth. Child marriage also imposes substantial economic costs to developing countries, impeding development and prosperity gains.
Displaced populations are particularly vulnerable to child marriage, in communities where poverty, instability, and displacement put pressure on families to marry children, particularly young girls, off at a young age. One United Nations
(UN)study found that child marriage rates were 4 times higher among displaced Syrian refugees than among Syrians before the crisis. This indicates that displacement, instability, and poverty are driving child marriages. United Nations agencies, including UNICEF and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), have acknowledged the dangers of child marriage and taken steps to address its risk in the populations they serve. The UN Joint Program on Child Marriage supports this work by building the resilience of populations to indirectly prevent child marriage and by generating new data and evidence on the prevalence of child marriage in humanitarian and fragile settings. For example, in Uganda, the UN Joint Program on Child Marriage helped 27,000 adolescent girls strengthen critical skills through school clubs and Go Back to School campaigns, as well as life skills and financial literacy training. After the UN Joint Program on Child Marriage identified Yemen as one of its focus countries, 65,000 people, of whom 45,000 are adolescents, were reached with awareness-raising activities on the harms of child marriage in 2018 alone. As a result, local council representatives, elders, and community leaders from 6 districts signed a pledge to support advocacy efforts to end child marriage.