Child marriage comes with a price tag: $175 billion

When Carmen Martell was 14, she met a 23-year-old man in her small New Hampshire town. He worked at the nearby brickyard, and she loved him. She started skipping school, running away and getting into legal trouble. At one point, a judge ordered her to go to a disciplinary group home in Vermont — but Martell’s mother didn’t want her to go that far. 

“I got along good with my mom — I was the youngest of 11 kids,” Martell said. “I didn’t get in trouble with the law or school or anything before I met him. I was pretty sheltered.”

Her mother went to the brickyard and told the boyfriend she would charge him with statutory rape of a minor if he didn’t marry Martell. So a few weeks into her eighth grade year in 1985, Martell got married. She was 15. 

She never went back to school. She suffered years of domestic violence from her partner, eventually divorcing him to protect her children. Her mother died, leaving her without emotional or financial support. She has needed government assistance to stay afloat.

“I feel like all my life I’ve had to just do everything in survival mode,” Martell said. “Even after the divorce, I got remarried but it was the same kind of pattern. That was the only pattern I knew.” 

Martell’s story is not unique. Between 2000 and 2021, nearly 315,000 minors were legally married in the United States — with girls being far more likely to be wed as children than boys. Child marriage was legal in all 50 states until 2018, but since then, 16 states have passed bans. 

The United States has a comparatively low rate of child marriage, but its continued legality has drawn the attention of researchers who want to eliminate the practice altogether. This week, Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta and founder of Lean In Foundation, in partnership with Columbia University released a new report, “Accelerating Efforts to End Child Marriage,” that calculated that the global cost of inaction amounts to $175 billion each year. The report also highlights potential strategies — including investing in education, improving access to reproductive health, and shifting cultural and social norms — that could help end the practice in the United States

“We rarely talk about child marriage in economic terms, but we should. In addition to the concrete costs in lost productivity and higher health expenditures, child marriage forecloses the ingenuity and ideas each girl might have brought to the world — an incalculable squandering,” Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state and former senator, and Sheryl Sandberg wrote in the report’s foreword. Clinton is currently the Board Chair of the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University. 

Rachel Vogelstein, director of the Women’s Initiative at Columbia’s Institute of Global Politics and co-author of the new report, said that in the past 25 years, the rate of child marriage globally has decreased from 1 in 4 girls married as children to 1 in 5. But advocates and researchers are troubled by a trend of countries shifting priorities and resources away from gender equality and ending child marriage. 

Last year, the United States froze billions of dollars of foreign assistance that helped advance women’s rights and gender equality, including programs to help end child marriage. Vogelstein also pointed to a number of authoritarian-leaning and populist regimes that have dismantled government bodies focused on advancing the rights of women and girls, including in Turkey and Argentina. In Iraq, the parliament recently proposed an amendment that would permit girls to be married at 9.

“There is concern that this broader aggression in commitment to women’s and girls’ human rights and the backlash that we’ve seen to gender equality, which we see manifesting here in the United States, will affect the fight against child marriage everywhere — including here,” Vogelstein said. 

Though the vast majority of child marriages occur in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the United States is proof that child marriage can still exist in countries where girls have stronger access to education and employment. 

“I think a lot of this gets excused as tradition or culture,” Sandberg said. “Well, there are a lot of things in the world that were cultural that were terrible and are long gone.” 

What makes the report particularly unique is its focus on the economic impact of child marriage. According to an analysis from the Center for Global Development, child marriage costs the world up to $175 billion per year — nearly $2.5 trillion by 2040 — from lost productivity and increased health risks. The report argues that it would take only a $1.3 billion investment to reduce the rate of child marriage by 30 percent in the next five years. 

“I hope that folks will start to think about this not only as something that we ought to address because it’s the right thing to do, but something we ought to address because it’s the smart thing to do,” Vogelstein said. 

Fatima Maada Bio, the first lady of Sierra Leone and a member of Columbia’s child marriage advisory council, said she was able to criminalize child marriage in her country after five years of getting buy-in from communities and the people. Maada Bio is one of the most vocal advocates against child marriage, and she argues it’s more than a humanitarian issue. 

“I’ve gone around the world to talk about this issue, and I’ve never seen a minister of finance talk about the financial implications of this issue for any government,” Maada Bio said. “And they should be talking about this. And the ministers of education should be talking about the benefit of keeping women in schools. Ministers of health should be talking about how many girls are dying in their hospitals.” 

Maada Bio said she continues to fight for an end to child marriage around the country because she herself was married at 12 and knows the kind of impact that can have on girls’ lives.

“The Fatima that didn’t have a voice, that’s the Fatima I’m fighting for now,” Maada Bio said. 

Martell, now 56, said that she was at a doctor’s appointment a few years ago and she saw in her medical notes: “Child abuse.”

She called the doctor immediately and said, “What do you mean? My mother never abused me.” And for the first time, someone explained to Martell that when she got married, she was still a child. Martell said she plays that conversation over and over in her head. 

“I had never thought of it that way,” Martell said. “If someone asked me if a 15-year-old should get married today, I would be absolutely against it. I would go to protests or sign any petition. I feel that those years formed my life.” 

Martell said she was shocked to find out that child marriage is still legal in most parts of the United States. Her own home state, New Hampshire, did not pass a ban until 2024 — nearly 40 years after she was married as a minor. 

“I wish there was a law back then,” Martell said. “I wanted it, but you’re too young. You can’t buy cigarettes. You can’t drive. You can’t do so many things, but yet you’re allowed to get married. It’s mind-blowing. Back then, I didn’t know any better. I didn’t look at life through all the cracks and crevices — I had blinders on.”