New York, May 2 (EFE).- Latin America is one of the regions of the world where the fight against child marriage has made the least progress in the last 25 years, only surpassed by sub-Saharan Africa, according to the latest report by UNICEF (the agency of the UN for children) on the phenomenon.
Of the 640 million women who have been victims of child marriage in the world, the vast majority (45%) are in South Asia, but that region is taking the fastest steps to eradicate the phenomenon, which It does not happen in sub-Saharan Africa (20% of current cases) or in Latin America and the Caribbean (9% of the total).
Currently, India accounts for a third of all child marriages worldwide; in the next third, Asian countries also dominate (Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Pakistan) but Brazil and Mexico already appear in that third.
“Latin America has not registered progress in child marriage in the last 25 years and will thus become the region with the second highest level of early marriages by 2030, only surpassed by sub-Saharan Africa,” the report highlights.
But the persistence of the phenomenon in Latin America is not unequivocal, and shows great differences if social differences are taken into account: “Trends show a persistent division between rich and poor: early marriage is rare among the richest segments, while it is resists change among the poorest”.
In fact, a graph that differentiates the evolution between the richest quintile (one fifth) and the poorest shows that in the Latin American case, for 25 years child marriage has only decreased in the case of rich, but it has risen in the case of the poor; this rise is only repeated in Africa, both north and south, while in the rest of the world the trend is to decrease, regardless of social class.
