Indonesia has banned marriage for young girls

ONE IN FIVE girls marries before reaching adulthood. One in twenty is wed before her fifteenth birthday. In Indonesia, which has the eighth-highest number of child brides in the world according to the UN, the phenomenon should soon be a thing of the past. This month the country’s parliament raised the minimum age at which girls can marry from 16 to 19. Legislators were spurred to act after the Constitutional Court ruled in December that it was discriminatory to mandate a lower minimum age of marriage for girls than for boys.

This is good news. But on this measure, Indonesia is by no means the worst offender. According to UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency, 14% of Indonesian women marry before they reach 18 years old. In Bangladesh the figure is 59%; in Niger it is 76%. Nineteen of the 20 countries where child marriage is most prevalent are in Africa (see map).