Legal Progress and Socio-Economic Reflections on Child Marriage in Latin America
International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family (Int J Law Policy Family), Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 1-16 (Advance article), May 2021
DOI: 10.1093/lawfam/ebab008
18 Pages Posted: 5 Aug 2021 Last revised: 11 Aug 2021
Abstract
Most Latin American countries have increased the legal age of marriage to 16 or 18 years during the last years. However, the numbers of child marriages in Latin America do not reflect those reforms so far. Some reforms might be too recent. But furthermore, the legal age of marriage is only one factor out of many. The legislative reforms regulate civil marriage leaving informal unions and religious or indigenous marriages unaffected. Thus, the reforms might prevent early civil marriages, but they have not eliminated early informal unions and early religious or indigenous marriages and the socio-economic factors that can promote them.
Note: This article is published in the Max Planck Private Law Research Paper Series through Open Access funding provided by Max Planck Society. It is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). No changes were made to the article.
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