Child marriage, female genital mutilation urgent priorities as pandemic threatens progress

February is a busy month for retailers marketing the promise of “happily ever after” to girls around the world. But for tens of millions of girls, this is just a fairytale. Their girlhoods are ending, not with storybook romance but with harmful rites of passage such as child marriage and female genital mutilation – practices believed to be increasing as the COVID-19 pandemic forces girls out of school and drags their families into poverty.

There is strong international consensus that child marriage and female genital mutilation are human rights violations that must stop, yet the practices persist. Globally, some 200 million women or girls alive today have experienced female genital mutilation, and at least 4 million girls are at risk of undergoing the practice each year. Some 650 million women alive today were married off before their 18th birthdays, and tens of thousands more are married every day.

Last year, UNFPA and partners projected that the pandemic would likely delay efforts to end both practices. These delays could result in 2 million more cases of female genital mutilation over a 10-year period that could otherwise have been averted. Deferred efforts to end child marriage, along with increasing rates of poverty, could lead to 13 million more cases of child marriage over the same decade-long period.

Advocates are now ramping up efforts to prevent these grim forecasts from taking hold.

The sixth of February is the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, and Valentine’s Day, on the 14th, is a moment when child marriage advocates traditionally sound the alarm over early marriage. This year, advocates are calling on leaders, community members, and parents to take decisive action against both practices. It is time, they say, to give girls the power to claim their bodies and futures for themselves.

Global action to empower girls

Together, UNFPA and UNICEF are running two of the world’s largest collaborations to end these harmful practices.

The UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Programme on Female Genital Mutilation works in 16 countries where the practice is prevalent. In 2019, these efforts resulted in more than 2.8 million people in 3,362 communities publicly declaring they would abandon female genital mutilation.

The UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage covers 12 countries that account for over 300 million of the world’s current and former child brides. Between 2016 and 2019, the Global Programme reached 7.9 million girls with empowerment programmes teaching girls about their rights and bodily autonomy and the harms of child marriage. A further 240 million individuals have been reached through media campaigns.