Age, marriage, and enslavement: Child marriage in contemporary slavery debates

While early/child and forced marriage have been on the humanitarian agenda since before the contemporary human rights movement and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (U.D.H.R.), we are seeing today an unprecedented level of international attention to the issue. Foreign Ministers of Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands and other countries have made early/ child and forced marriage priority foreign policy issues. The Human Rights Council held a special panel on child, early and forced marriage in 2014 and most international funders and non-governmental organizations working on children’s rights include child marriage in their research and policy programming. Further, the Global Slavery Index included child marriage of one of its indices. This paper will critically and historically assess the conflation of marriage under 18 years of age with slavery.