Colombia figure in the 20th place in the list of countries in the world with more girls married or in forced unions before turning 15 years old, and number 11 in Latin America and the Caribbean, as reported by Unicef.
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This UN agency presented the Analysis of the situation of child marriages and early unions in Colombia 2010-2020, a report that compiles that, according to the National Census, for 2018 more than 340,000 girls and adolescents (8.6% of the total) were married or in early unions.
This translates into 23% of women between the ages of 20 and 24 being married or in a union before the age of 18 and 5% before the age of 15.
It is a problem thathas remained normalized in the country and in the region“, explained the Unicef representative in Colombia, Tanya Chapuisat, who added that this report is intended to make visible for help shape public policy for your “effective prevention, care and eradication“.
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“It is time for this harmful practice for the rights of girls and adolescents to become visible and for the pertinent actions to be taken so that no girl in Colombia is a wife and mother.“, asked the UNICEF representative.
In children and adolescents that figure was about 133,000, which represents 3.2%, in a phenomenon that, therefore, is more common among girls and, above all, in rural populations that live far from services, indigenous and Afro-Colombian.
3.8% of indigenous girls, According to this study, between 10 and 14 years of age they are in or have been in a union, a figure that rises to 23.8% in female adolescents between 15 and 19 years of age.
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As long as I get in black, afro-descendant, palenquera or raizal population 2.5% of girls have been or are married or in union and for adolescents between 15 and 19 years old the figure is 18.2%.
Between 2010 and 2021, there have been more than 1.1 million births in Colombia in girls and adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19 who are in marriage or child unions.
“Colombian girls deserve a present and a future in which quality education, the guarantee of their sexual and reproductive rights, freedom, autonomy, justice and dignity are facts that lay the foundations for building life projects that they choose“, asked Chapuisat.
In addition, Unicef denounced that “no quantitative variation has been found in the last 25 years“, in the sense that the numbers of child marriages have decreased.
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The areas where there is more prevalence of child marriages and forced unions coincide with some of the departments where there is more afro or indigenous population and also those who have been hardest hit by the conflict.
These are the border departments of vichada (5.3% prevalence), Amazon (4.3%), collided (4.2%) and La Guajira (3.9%) in the case of girls from 10 to 14 years old and from Vichada (29.8%), cupcake (24.5%), Arauca (24.0%), Cease (23.8%), and La Guajira (23.2%) in adolescents between 15 and 19 years old.
Also, Colombia, along with six other countries in the region, allows marriage from the age of 14, provided that there is an authorization signed by a notary of the parents.
Child marriage is a circular phenomenon that is fed by other problems such as child pregnancies or rape, and which has a greater incidence when there are contexts such as those of the student dropout.
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In this way, between 2010 and 2021, more than 1.1 million births in girls and adolescents between 10 and 19 years old who are in marriage or child unions, while among single women the birth figures are 422,104.
That is, almost 73% of girls aged 10 to 19 who gave birth were married or in early unions.
There is also a close relationship between sexist or domestic violence and forced marriages, since “households formed as a result of child marriage or early union are characterized by violent environments and male domination“, is extracted from the report.
EFE
