Number of African child brides to soar by 2050 as population grows: U.N.

[Little Tich]

Source: Yahoo! News / Reuters

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The number of child brides in Africa will more than double by 2050 if current trends persist because of rapid population growth and limited social change, the United Nations children's fund (UNICEF) said on Thursday.

Africa will overtake South Asia as the region with the largest number of child brides, their number soaring to 310 million, more than 40 percent of the global total, in 2050, from 125 million, 25 percent of the total, today.

"The sheer number of girls affected - and what this means in terms of lost childhoods and shattered futures - underline the urgency of banning the practice of child marriage once and for all," UNICEF executive director Anthony Lake said in a statement at the start of a two-day African Union summit on ending child marriage.

"Each child bride is an individual tragedy. An increase in their number is intolerable."

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/number-african-child-brides-soar-2050-population-grows-012150427.html

[merrily]

1. These girls are mostly under age 15. Can we please call "child brides" what they really are?

These are not 14 year olds who fell madly in love and married young, as Jerry Lee Lewis's first bride/cousin supposedly did. These are victims of human trafficking. Why we use some adorable euphemism for that is beyond me.

[mpcamb]

2. Population Control. In the 60s.70s and into the 80s people talked openly and editorials were

written about it. What the hell happened? The world population hit 5 billion around 1990 and everybody gave up it seems. We desperately need to stop producing more people. I doubt there's much disagreement, even from the fundies.
Why no movement; why no outcry?

(O.K. I know there's the 'god will provide crowd', but they surely don't want those 'other people' to reproduce.)

[Reter]

3. China tried it

I guess it didn't work, they just ended it.

[progree]

5. It worked very well to lower population growth. And no they did not "end it"

Now they allow couples to have 2 children, i.e. allow replacement level for those couples who have children. Actually, below replacement level since there are always women who can't or won't have children.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/29/china-abandons-one-child-policy

That said, something like this can only be done in a strong dictatorship. I don't think most African countries have governments that have strong enough and intrusive enough control of their people to bring about the same kind of population growth reduction that China has

[bananas]

9. We realized the best way to control population growth and we are doing it.

Once we understood what causes population growth, we enacted policies which will level off the population around 10 billion, which is a sustainable level.
We've been doing this for decades.
The policies involve things like empowering women and improving peoples quailty of life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth

[FrodosPet]

11. Please tell me you don't support mandatory abortions and sterilization of poor African women?

Education, economic development, and cultural changes leading to the empowerment of women are absolutely necessary. But it would be horrible and hypocritical and supremely racist for the developed world to say to Africans "We will not let you reproduce".

[mpcamb]

12. Hell, no.

I support rational discussion about what this finite planet might support without recourse to war, exiles and over-running nearby countries. 5 billion in 1990 and 7.3 Billion today. At the risk of sounding insulting, are you seeing a pattern, a problem here?

If not, I think this discussion is done.

Industrial societies are going to have a lower birth rate. That's a component in China's withdrawal of 1 child (better be a boy) per family.
I agree that "Education, economic development, and cultural changes lead... to the empowerment of women", but poverty, bad circumstances and (dare-I-say-it) religion, all work against women's opportunities.

Further, I don't see 10 bill as a reasonable number of people for this planet at this time.
I think it's naive to think population's momentum wouldn't over-run that anyway.

[The2ndWheel]

14. Society needs more people

Every institution we've built requires more people. Governments needs more taxpayers, and businesses need more customers. Japan has a problem. Europe has a problem. The U.S. would have a problem, but we import a lot more people.

We have 4 options:

1) more people doing more
2) more people doing less
3) fewer people doing more
4) fewer people doing less

#4 isn't really an option, as society would collapse. #3 is basically the developed world, #2 is basically the developing world, and #1 is the world as a whole. So #1 is our only option at this point, as it's really the only fair one. Fair is always a tough concept in a finite world. If the planet is indeed finite, and that's what we hear when we talk about climate change, we can do #1, but it will come at the expense of something.

[Quantess]

15. The earth doesn't. (no text)

[The2ndWheel]

16. True

But we also don't like to play by those rules. That's why we, like any good corporation, try to write the rules which govern us.

The earth doesn't really need any specific species though. If we happen to kill a few off for our progression, the planet will still keep spinning.

[Quantess]

18. Cynical, but you have a point, somewhere.

You seem to champion our human species, which is nice and sweet.
I personally think humans are like a blight on the planet, sort of like cockroaches can be a blight in your apartment.

[lobodons]

4. 2050?

The future Child Bride's grandparents are not even born yet.

[progree]

6. UN projects Africa's population to more than double: from 1.186 B to 2.478 B by 2050, so no surprise

that child brides could double by then.

The UN's 2015 population projections:

http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/publications/files/key_findings_wpp_2015.pdf

and those population growth figures assumes a reduction in the fertility rate, but at a slower rate of reduction than prior forecasts.

The total fertility rate (TFR) has been declining in Africa over the past decade, but has been doing so at roughly one-quarter of the rate at which it declined in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1970s.
In some African countries, the TFR decline appears to have stalled.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3192285/World-s-population-soar-11-billion-2100-HALF-live-Africa-claims-report.html

Also many countries in the water-poor Middle East are rapidly growing.

The failure of fertility rates to fall as much as expected has caused the U.N. to raise its world population forecasts recently.

http://www.populationconnection.org/

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. Note that '310 million' is the number of women over 18 who were married before they were 18

It's a slightly confusing way of putting it.

The report: http://www.unicef.org/media/files/UNICEF-Child-Marriage-Brochure-low-Single%281%29.pdf

page 7:
Number of women aged 18 and older who were married or in union before age 18 if:
Prevalence remains at today’s levels: 310 million
Observed decline continues: 215 million
Progress is accelerated: 150 million

(currently, 34% of African women now aged 20 to 24 were married before they were 18. In 1990, that was 44%, so if the decline continues, that will be 23% by 2050. However, the overall population is growing, so all those figures are larger than Africa's percent 125 million)

[oberliner]

8. Very disturbing

Except, lamentably, this tragedy is largely ignored.

[Spacedog1973]

10. Its largely a result of poverty and lack of education

Lack of options for parents with children they cannot afford to support, lack of education of the parents and access to contraception - in addition to empire-strength religious education combine to produce a result that is inevitable. This is pretty much the same wherever poverty and lack of opportunity arise across the world. It really shouldn't happen in the most resource-rich continent on the planet, nor elsewhere, but consumer-lead societies can't see the end result of not paying a fair rate for a days work. Cheap resources, clothing, produce, materials and gadgets have a consequence.

[Quantess]

13. Don't forget FGM (Female Genital Mutilation)

http://www.oratechsolve.com/fgm-human-rights-violation/

Widely practiced violation of human rights

[Quantess]

17. Try to imagine yourself as a girl, 12 years old, with a disfigured, slashed , and sewn-up vagina

Nothing left in your crotch but an opening for urination.

Ready to be sold into "marriage"