Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu said on Thursday he is as committed to abolishing child marriage around the globe as he was to fighting apartheid in South Africa.
Tutu made his remarks at the launch of UN campaign to end child marriage by 2030, in a bid to free girls from poverty, ignorance and oppression at the hands of their husbands.
The UN Population Fund says about 37,000 girls under age 18 are being married off daily, at a pace rising toward 14.2 million a year by 2020, and 15.1 million a year by 2030, if the trend is not curbed.
“I give my commitment to work for the abolition of child marriage. That commitment is my dream, and I want it to be equal to the commitment that I had when I fought against apartheid,” said Tutu who is one of the group of “Elders” who advise the UN and governments on social problems.
The UN agency said the problem is mainly concentrated in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where girls as young as 5 or 6 are married off, but its study, “Marrying Too Young,” focused on the developing world, and did not include statistics on child marriage in China, Russia, Western Europe, Canada or the United States.
The UN Population Fund’s executive director, Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, called for all nations to set a mandatory marriage age of 18.
Many US states allow children of 16 or 17 to marry with parental permission or a court order; some allow marriage at 15 or 14 in special circumstances.