Peer-reviewed article
Exploring the socioeconomic factors behind girl child marriage in India
Sumant Kumar ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This paper examines the socioeconomic and cultural factors that drive child marriage among girls in India. Child marriage is shown to have widespread negative effects on girls' health, education, and wellbeing, including malnutrition, reproductive health problems, and limited livelihood opportunities. The study identifies three key areas for intervention: improving parent-child communication, changing harmful social norms and cultural practices, and addressing gender socialization patterns.
Key points
- Child marriage in India is deeply rooted in traditional, cultural, and religious practices
- Girl child marriage is associated with sexual abuse, reproductive and sexual health problems, psychosocial and mental health issues, malnutrition, and limited educational and livelihood opportunities
- Child marriage contributes to problems including dowry practices, child widowhood, inadequate maternal health, high fertility rates, and overpopulation
- Key interventions should focus on improving parent-child interaction, changing social norms and culture, and addressing gender socialization practices
Limitations
The paper is limited to examining child marriage cases in India only and does not include comparative analysis with other contexts. The abstract does not specify whether the paper presents new empirical findings or is a literature review.
Abstract
Abstract Child marriage has been a persistent problem in India. Child marriage is deeply rooted due to traditional, cultural, and religious practices, which have made it difficult to combat. Girl child marriage is an issue that can create several other problems among children, such as sexual abuse, juvenile justice, reproductive & sexual health, psychosocial & mental health, nutrition, protection, education, opportunities, and livelihood. Marriage of a girl child is frequently as-sociated with problems such as the practice of dowry and the prevalence of child widowhood. Moreover, it results in unfavourable outcomes such as malnutrition, inadequate maternal health, and high fertility rates, and contributes to the problem of overpopulation. The aim and objective of this paper are to understand the factors behind child marriages and their impact on the girl child. The limitation of this paper is to cases related to girlchild marriages in India only. The finding of this paper focused on three key issues; how to improve the interaction between parents and child, social norms and culture, and gender socialization practices to combat girl-child marriage in India.