Each year, 12 million girls are married before they turn 18. That amounts to 23 girls every minute, or one every three seconds. Often, child brides are only 6 or 7 years old, and their husbands may be in their 60s or 70s. This is a global problem that is common and surpasses all nations, boundaries, cultures, and ethnicities—from the Far East to the Americas.
As per Girls Not Brides, a “global partnership of more than 1,000 civil society organizations from over 95 countries committed to ending child marriage,” about 650 million women alive today were married when they were children.
