Child Marriage and Cultural Relativism

 by Eliza Stevens

To what extent should we be cultural relativists when it comes to child marriage? Child marriage is any formal marriage or informal union between two people when one or both parties are under the age of 18. However, for many girls this union takes place much sooner and in some countries girls are as young as 7 or 8 and are forced to marry much older men. Every year on average 12 million girls are forced to marry under the age of 18. 

The country with the highest rate of child marriage is Niger. However, Bangladesh has the highest overall prevalence of marriage involving girls under the age of 15. The main causes of this include: cultural traditions, religious pressures, the fear of a girl remaining unmarried into her adult years and the inability of women to work for money thus creating the need for a husband to be able to provide for them. Most importantly however, it is poverty that links to bride price, as selling a daughter would make the family a significant amount of money. 

Child marriage exposes young girls to a significant increase in the likeliness of health problems and violence. Furthermore it denies them the access to support systems and continues the cycle of gender inequality. It also affects a girl's childhood by placing her in danger of early, frequent, high-risk pregnancies. This is harmful for girls under 15 as they are five times more likely to die from childbirth in comparison to women in their 20s. 

Is it fair that these girls in Sub-Saharan Africa should have to grow up with the expectation that this will happen to them at the early stages of their lives? Here lies a moral dilemma, in which the concept of moral relativism plays an important role. Moral relativism is the idea that one accepts something due to the culture that it is happening in. 

Child marriage is in many cases a cultural tradition, so to what extent do outsiders have the right to interfere? Some might argue that ending child marriage is the morally right thing to do suggesting that girls around the world all equally deserve to live full and happy childhoods. They would argue that all girls should be granted the right to go to school and have an education but most importantly to be free of the violence and the negative health impacts that child marriage brings. 

On the other hand, the moral relativists would argue that in fact it has nothing to do with the people who aren’t involved with their cultural heritage and should therefore be moral relativists and accept that perhaps we don’t agree with their traditions, but that it is the cultural orthodoxy that so many have adopted for hundreds of years and why should we be the generation to change these traditions now? 

Despite this argument for being moral relativists, the UN has taken a different approach and believes that child marriage should be stopped. One of the UN’s new aims is to protect millions of girls from child marriage by 2030 and to protect the legal rights of some of the most vulnerable children around the world. For those girls that are married currently at a young age, the UN also aims to support them across Africa, Asia and the Middle East where the rates are highest. They are striving to improve the education, health care and are even educating the parents on the dangers that child marriages hold.