Definition
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines any human being below the age of 18 to be a child. Therefore, child marriage is the marriage of a girl or boy where one or either of them is below the age of 18 years. In international human rights discourse, child marriage is interchangeably used with early marriage. Early marriage also implies the inability to offer considered consent even after the individual has crossed the age of 18. Adding forced marriage which is totally nonconsensual to it, these are viewed as harmful practices thereby a human rights violation (UNICEF 2014; UNFPA 2020). However, the lives of individuals are embedded in social relations, in communities and cultures, and so the meaning of early and child marriage that we adopt is more complex and reflects the complex social structures and dynamics of social relations that India reflects.
Introduction
All over the globe, the dominant understanding in addressing the practice of early and child...
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Gopal, M. (2020). Early and Child Marriage in India: A Framework to Achieve SDGs. In: Leal Filho, W., Azul, A., Brandli, L., Lange Salvia, A., Wall, T. (eds) Gender Equality. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70060-1_109-1
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