Child Marriage is Child Labour:
The ILO
UN Photo / Jean-Marc Ferré
Recognizing that illegal child marriage is child labour is not merely a rhetorical step in the battle against child marriage, and our focus on the International Labour Organization is not accidental.
The ILO is an enormously powerful and effective UN agency, setting the world’s standards for labour rights and for eliminating child labour. The ILO's International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour is the largest program of its kind, with operations in 88 countries—including 16 of the 20 countries with the highest rates of child marriage. It is this effectiveness that makes their stance on the issue so important.
There are many potential benefits of the ILO’s recognition of child "marriage" as child labour:
It will ensure that girls are not neglected in the global fight against child labour.
It will engage all three powerful groups of ILO constituents: governments, business coalitions, and trade unionists, to work together in-country on the issue of child “marriage.”
It will ensure that the 187 member countries of the ILO provide better and more accurate data on child "marriage" and take stronger action to protect girls’ rights.
It will signify that the ILO is finally acknowledging, counting, and properly addressing a practice that destroys the health of girls, robs them of sexual and reproductive choices, puts them at lifelong high risk of sexually transmitted infections, and exponentially increases their chances of dying in childbirth. It will help to address the frighteningly high rates of HIV amongst adolescent girls by highlighting underage marriage as a serious but much-ignored risk factor.
At its most fundamental level, this campaign is about pushing the ILO to publicly recognize that combatting child labour necessarily requires combatting child marriage, since millions of children, mostly girls, are performing child labour due to their illegal marriage. The ILO needs to make this public acknowledgment, which would then necessarily lead to updating its policies, programmes, and data. We recognize these changes, particularly in data, can’t happen overnight. But the data can be presented in ways that more accurately reflect the gender balance in child labour.
Child labour statistics currently give the mistaken impression that the problem overwhelmingly affects boys. Adding in the labour of girls in child marriages—whether it is counted as household chores, or forced labour—reveals that child labour is very definitely a female problem as well. The ILO needs to start presenting its statistics accordingly, combining child labour and household chore data, and providing estimates that acknowledge the millions of girls in illegal child marriages whose labour isn’t being included in child labour statistics.
The ILO is doing serious work on child labour, but the way it treats labour in child marriages perpetuates a gender bias that is simply not acceptable. In order to fulfill its mission to eradicate child labour, the ILO must start to be a voice, and a leader, in the battle against child marriage.
For an in-depth analysis of the ILO's response, read our report, Child Marriage is Child Labour: The disappearance of girls from child labour statistics.