What I thought about child marriage as a cause area, and how I've changed my mind

1-4. Thanks for the positive feedback Lizka 🙂

5. Thanks for sharing those links.
 a) No I had not seen that! I did not know that any EA orgs had done a profile on this issue. 
b) Great to know about those threads, I am exciting to read and learn more in this space.

Thanks for visualising this, I found it useful. I think that I need to better understand what the harms are and how they are caused to evaluate the best model.

Right now, the third model makes most sense to me. This is because the negative outcomes associated with child marriage occur outside of child marriage as well and it would be better to address the outcome as a whole, not just where it is happening in the context of child marriage. 

Hi Karthik, thanks for engaging with my post. I think my post expresses two things: 

a) the shock at finding evidence late into the project that had the potential to undermine other findings 

b) my updated my position in light of new evidence. 
 

I think I may have accidentally over-expressed a) to demonstrate the importance of looking for evidence that disagrees with positions early when researching topics. To clarify, my position now is definitely not that child marriage is not harmful. 

My updated position is that the range of metrics across which child marriage is definitely and reliably   harmful is narrowed. Unfortunately, with mixed and noisy results it is hard to know what is poor research design and what is lack of effect size. I still think that at the end of this project I will find that there  is a good  case that child marriage should be prevented, based on metrics I have not looked at yet,  physical violence and the likelihood that girls will complete less school. 

If I was trying to determine whether child marriage was harmful or not harmful, I would probably come back with a clear yes. But I have focused on exactly working out what exactly what  harms are taking place because it has implications for the interventions that would be most effective, e.g. whether we focus on delaying the age of marriage to later teenage years because younger marriages are a lot worse or ending all marriages under 18 because all child marriages are equally harmful.  

I take your point on the use of contraception, I do not know the rates of sexual activity in marriages or outside for these populations, but I would assume girls in marriages are having more sex, earlier.

I will further consider your view that perhaps I have not weighted my prior beliefs highly enough.  I think I am hesitant about these views because I know that beliefs about when someone should get married and have children are very culturally determined, e.g. my grandmother got married at 19, which is shockingingly young to me, but was normal and what she wanted at the time.

This goes back to my take about how the problem here is actually LMIC governance, but it seems trivially true that child marriage is objectively very bad and  also relatively bad compared to the opportunities that these girls should have, but it might also be true that it's not so bad  compared to the very limited opportunities they actually do have (albeit probably still negative). But the pathway to getting rid of child marriage seems clear: just improve governance & economic growth rates, and the problem will take care of itself as the  economic returns to delaying marriage grow and grow. That seems much more tractable than some sort of mass cultural transformation. 

Hi Glenra, thanks for engaging with the post. This is something I had not considered at all, and something I will consider for my QALY calculation. More kids may also worsen the economic situation of a family already living in a poor, rural place, and may not increase the happiness of parents. There is not available data on whether child marriage reduces the risk of never getting married, but there is data on the number of births (lots of it referenced here if you are interested Fan and Koski, 2022). Thanks for giving me challenging food for thought.

Thanks for reading and engaging with my post Ryan! 

Thanks for raising the capability approach here, I had not heard of it before. Thinking about how child marriage curtails life prospects was one of my personal motivations for looking at this topic in the first place. I was reading The Precipice at the time and thinking about the parallel with the future of humanity being curtailed by existential crises. 

I agree that just because losing options for life  is somewhat unmeasurable does not mean it is not important. Take this example of Stella, interviewed in a BBC podcast. Stella is a 22 year old woman who as a girl who was helped by a grassroots program in Kenya. She experienced a forced marriage and had a son when she was 11.  She is now at university and has a drastically different life, and according to her much better life, than if the program had not intervened.

I do not have a way to include this in my model but I will keep thinking on it. Some things I am  considering related to this: 

1. Divorce rates are really high (similar to US) in some contexts where there is child marriage, e.g. in Ethiopia, so child marriage can be escaped. Obviously if you have children things are very complicated. Accessibility of family planning can help keep options open for girls to divorce.

2. Many things limit the possibility of people's options, like being in poverty or growing up in a rural place. These things would have to be considered as confounding variables.

3. I generally have the view that being married would curtail choice, but others may believe that marrying early allows more choice, e.g. better choice of partner within a community, better access to resources and freedoms that come from being an adult in a household rather than a child in your parents' household. This is a fraught line of reasoning and I am very unsure here. This speaks to some of the criticisms that you note in your post on the capability approach about it being culturally biased towards liberalism.

Hi Lily,

Thanks for your considered and thoughtful response, it touched on a lot of thoughts I have had throughout this project.

1.  My intuition from the outset of this project that child marriage would be intrinsically bad because it would expose children to unwanted sex and pregnancy. I have tried to leave that intuition to one side as much as possible because I know ideas about gender and adulthood/childhood are pretty culturally entangled.

In saying that,  my ideal model of harm would definitely take into account whether someone wanted to get married and psychological wellbeing. Unfortunately, the available data does provide a lot of clarity.I will look into more qualitative data on what girls think about their marriages to address this. 

In the meantime, here are some survey results from Erulkar, 2017, who is a researcher at Population Council on this topic (Table 1). You will see that the results change dramatically between the different groups, some marriages being wanted and some being unwanted, arranged and not arranged, when they found out about the marriage, etc. (Erulkar, 2017). Bear in mind that the Tanzania group had the lowest n, and that the sample sizes in general are not that large. Also note that these are pretty much raw results as percentages, no upper or lower limits provided.

Table 1: What girls surveyed think about their marriages (Erulkar, 2017)

Psychological wellbeing

Fan and Koski, 2022 summarise the data on psychological wellbeing as:

• one US based study and one small Iranian study showing decreased psychological well-being for girls married before 18
• a study from Niger and Ethiopia showing decreased wellbeing for girls married before 16 but not 16-17 (Table 2)
• a study from Ghana that found child marriage protected against measures of stress.

In the study from Niger and Ethiopia, it suggests a pattern of decreased psychological wellbeing for girls married at 12, 13, 14 for both countries, and 15 and 16 for Ethiopia (Table 2)(John et al., 2019). However, please note the standard deviation for these approximations is more than 20 points for each. For me this says:

• child marriage may be worse the younger you are when you are married
• the harms of child marriage are likely to be drastically different depending where its happening
• available data has a lot of uncertainty.

Table 2: Psychological well being

How sexual violence is measured

I agree with you that measures of sexual violence do not address all non-consensual sex and this is a harm that should be included in the overall model of harm of child marriage. I will look for some data on surveys about non consensual sex more broadly as part of this project going forward, unfortunately early signs are that this likely has not been measured. Fan and Koski, 2022 note that all 16 studies they considered in their review on this topic either use the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data or word their questions very similarly to ask about sexual violence:

h)  physically force you to have sexual intercourse with him when you did not want to?

i)  physically force you to perform any other sexual acts you did not want to?

j)  force you with threats or in any other way to perform sexual acts you did not want to?

I think there is a pretty strong argument that if you were a child married to an adult and you did not believe they were allowed to say no, you could experience a lot of non-consensual sex without answering yes to any of these questions.

2. Yes I agree it’s incredibly fraught! I will look for more qualitative data on this and provide it in this thread when I have it.

3. I have the same view that child marriage under 15 would likely show to be much more harmful compared to getting married post 15 if it was broadly studied, but this is only my opinion. Hopefully I should be able to run this data myself using the DHS data.

4. Yes, I left out fertility on purpose because there is disagreement about whether reducing fertility is good or bad, and I do not have a firm view on this. I think increasing access to family planning is an even more non-problematically good thing to do regarding fertility. This is what the Maternal Health Initiative is working on in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In this conference recording, Erulkar talks about the potential of delaying child marriage as a way to increase the gaps between generations, as governments in Sub-Saharan Africa are (in her view) struggling to keep up with the number of young people and provide enough services. This is something I have not explored yet.

I do, in general, think that preventing child marriage could have positive socioeconomic outcomes. One of them is if it increased the education of girls. A popular and cheap intervention for child marriage is to fund girls’ education through supplies or paying school fees. Erulkar, 2017 costed providing school supplies at $20 per girl per year. Girls and women increasing education has positive effects on countries’ economic prosperity (World Bank, 2018).

Thank you again for responding so thoughtfully to my post! Also thank you for introducing me to the term 'non-problematically'! Very useful in this space where pretty much everything is somewhat problematic.

Presumably, most of these cultures place a high premium on women having kids (and probably a lot of kids, hence the child marriages). This isn’t to say that we should completely ignore kids’ preferences (adapted preferences are still preferences!), but I don’t think we should take them at face value, either.

I agree there is a lot of instinctive force behind this; it definitely seems like some preferences are in some sense 'illegitimate' e.g. this). However, it also seems like a potentially fairly symmetrical argument. Should we also decline to take people's preferences for fewer children at face value if they grew up in a place that de-emphasizes family, or education-related preferences if someone grew up in an are that emphasized schooling? Without a general theory of what makes a preference legitimate it seems hard to object in specific cases.

Thanks Vaidehi! 🙂

I am generally familiar with Charity Entrepreneurship but had not seen the page you linked. This will be super useful as I continue this project and other future projects, thank you.

I agree, that group would be awesome!

Thanks for the wording pick up, I have rewritten the sentence so it is hopefully clearer now.

Thanks Kirsten :) great to be in a community to openly discuss ideas in good faith.

Thanks for the positive feedback :) .  I agree, I think most research conducted finds very little, because proving things is really hard. This Clearer Thinking podcast that I linked in the original post goes into this more deeply for anyone interested in why it's so hard.

I think the "family/cultural pressure" to marry is very likely to be downstream of an unexpected pregnancy as a result of rape. I have never seen any estimates for for the percentage of girls in SSA for whom sexual initiation (for want of a better phrase) comes through rape, but anecdotally I wouldn't be surprised if it were over 70% in many countries. Again "child marriage" is not the problem here, the problem is likely a) weak growth = less reason to delay marriage and build human capital and b) massive, endemic sexual violence that is just absolutely everywhere.

Thanks for engaging with the post Jeff :) 

My understanding is that contraceptive use is a positive outcome in the prevention of girls/women contracting STIs from their husbands in this context. Child marriage puts girls at risk of contracting STIs in two ways:
- The marriage is polygamous. This survey is a very small sample size, but provides a sense that at least in Burkina Faso and Tanzania, some marriages are polygamous. 
- As the men girls marry are older than them, they are likely more sexually experienced than the girls and have a higher risk of already having STIs and passing them on to their wives.

Erulkar, 2017


 

I agree, child marriage would probably be only one outcome we would be aiming to address. The broader picture might be an effort to increase girls' education through a simple and scalable intervention. 

Hi Tsunayoshi, thanks for reading the post. Oh no! I just clicked them all and they worked for me... are they still not working for you? Let me know and I can investigate the problem further.

Hi Scott, great to hear from someone else doing research without much experience. Would be great to bounce ideas off each other and review each other's work in future. My email is [email protected] :) 

Yes that is also my intuition at this stage, as the negative outcomes of child marriage also occur outside of that context and we would want to address the whole problem, not just where it occurs within child marriage.
 

Thanks for the typo pick up! I have edited the post.

Thanks for engaging with the post :) 

I think Lizka's comment  visualises this phenomena well. I think the answer would probably be to be targeting the negative outcomes themselves rather than child marriage.

• I would bracket all kinds of developing world health and social interventions into this cluster of "things that are vastly less important than improving developing world governance"

This is why we have the ITN model, right? Improving governance is super important, but it seems to fail the tractability test most of the time. Trying to improve institutions with government officials who profit from the existing, more extractive institutions is a massive, intractable, relatively thankless task. Also, outsiders are in a worse position to create institutional change, so you have to spend a lot of your time and resources just trying to get a place at the table. For the neglectedness part, loads of people are dedicated to trying to make poor nations rich- it's been the objective of development economists/ IMF/ World Bank people/ many of the smartest people in developing countries way before RCTs and micro-interventions came into fashion. If you can find neglected sub-areas, that's obviously great, but low-hanging fruit seems rare. 

• "I don't remotely understand what the point is of mental health interventions like StrongMinds. I'd also be quite depressed if my government was as dreadful as most governments are in sub-Saharan Africa, and even the best mental health treatment surely can't last for long given the stark reality..."  

The fact that people have a valid external reason to be depressed doesn't mean that it's pointless treating their depression. People in poor countries can have decent mental health, as any life satisfaction survey should be able to demonstrate. From solely first-order effects, if you think their data is valid, it's probably a better way of improving lives than most Give Well interventions. There are also some second-order, or 'trickle-up' effects for most micro-interventions. The human capital theory of development argues that culture, education, health etc. lead to greater productivity, which leads to a more educated and mobile populace, which leads to better institutions and leads to growth. This piece explains this part of the debate- should also note that randomistas think that their interventions are robustly good, even if they cause comparatively little growth.   

• " I'm not saying that EA should pivot into figuring institutional mechanisms for Amazon to buy out Zimbabwe, but it does seem a vastly more effective cause area than most other things you could spend your time on in this field." 

I agree that we should be considering ambitious institutional interventions (SEZs / charter cities, or at least something like growth diagnostics), but this one is surely a non-starter. It's hard enough getting a low-income country to marginally decrease agricultural tariffs, let alone selling your whole country to Amazon.

Responding just to the comment about StrongMinds – I think mental health is an incredibly complicated issue, and mental illness is very multi-factored, so even if some people in sub-Saharan Africa are depressed due to bad governance, others may be depressed due to reasons that mental health services would alleviate. In any event, the fact that depression in sub-Saharan Africa is not even remotely close to 100% means the statement "I'd also be quite depressed if my government was as dreadful as most governments are in sub-Saharan Africa" is basically a non sequitur. 

Agree that improving economic growth in LMICs + international wealth redistribution would be effective in solving lots of social problems in LMICs, but both are highly intractable in my opinion, so would probably not solve a specific social problem more cost-efficiently than a targeted intervention aimed at that social problem. 

(But FWIW, I don't think improving economic growth in LMICs and international wealth redistribution are so intractable that they have no place in the EA movement)