Peer-reviewed article
Child marriage among Serbia’s Roma population: A tradition or not?
Dragan Todorović, Ivan Djordjević ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This paper examines child marriage among Serbia's Roma population, where 57.2% of Roma women aged 20-49 entered their first union before age 18, compared to 7.9% in the general Serbian population. The authors argue that child marriage cannot be justified as tradition and is forbidden by Serbian law and human rights standards. The paper proposes that marginalization, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and social norms within Roma communities perpetuate this harmful practice. The authors recommend legal protections, awareness-raising, and support services to reduce child marriage and promote Roma inclusion in Serbian society.
Key points
- 57.2% of Roma women aged 20-49 married before age 18, compared to 7.9% of general Serbian population
- Child marriage among Roma is linked to multiple social factors including poverty, unemployment, education gaps, and gender roles
- The practice violates Serbian law and universal human rights standards
- Marginalization is presented as a key explanatory framework for understanding child marriage persistence
- Recommendations include legal protections, social awareness campaigns, and alternative support for at-risk children and families
Limitations
The paper describes the prevalence and context of child marriage but does not evaluate the effectiveness of any specific intervention to reduce the practice. It relies on UNICEF data from 2019-2020 and does not provide longitudinal evidence on outcomes or intervention success.
Abstract
According to UNICEF data from 2019, among the general population of married women in Serbia aged 20 to 49 or those in a common-law marriage, 7.9 % entered their first union before the age of 18. Among their peers from Roma communities, this percentage is as high as 57.2 % (UNICEF, 2020:396). Click or tap here to enter text.Marriage among adolescent girls and boys, who are physically and psychosocially immature, uneducated, and economically dependent, can no longer be justified by the specific customs and traditions of a community. Understanding and combating this cultural practice requires an explicit public articulation of its harmful nature, particularly because this practice is forbidden by the Serbian legislative system and violates universal human rights. The persistence of the practice of early marriage of Roma girls in the twenty-first century, a phenomenon with multiple harmful consequences for the Roma population, only confirms its complex and multidimensional nature and the necessity of considering it in interaction with numerous social factors, such as poverty, unemployment, education, social norms, customs, and gender roles in the community, lack of efficiency among institutions and policy instruments, etc. This paper offers the concept of a marginalized environment as an explanatory framework within which the practice of child marriage among the Roma in Serbia has been functioning and perpetuated (UNICEF, 2017). By means of measures aimed at protecting Roma children from all forms of neglect, violence, and abuse (formulating and implementing appropriate legal solutions, raising social awareness, and providing alternatives to at-risk children and their families), state authorities would significantly contribute to reducing existing prejudices against the Roma and empowering members of the Roma community in Serbia for more successful inclusion into Serbian society.