Nana, FR Khan, my maternal grandfather, returned to undivided India from Italy after fighting at Monte Cassino during the Second World War. During the war his young wife had died at home in childbirth. When he returned, his family arranged for him to meet the older daughter of a family in the biradari with a view to marriage. Instead, family lore tells us, he looked up and saw the younger sister sitting in a tree. That girl became my Nani, Qamar meaning Moon, my grandmother.
She was fifteen. He was around thirty. They married soon afterwards, jumped on a train to Agra and started an exciting life together. Filled with love, people, travel, glamour and camaraderie. They had four daughters, two survived, my mother and her elder sister. They weathered Partition together, crossed the border into Pakistan in 1947, looked after their 12 siblings (between them) and built a stylish, international life together. Their story is one our family tells with warmth and tenderness.
But I’ve always thought about that girl in the tree getting married at 15.
Just over a week ago, the United Nations General Assembly did something it had never done before: it adopted, by consensus, a resolution establishing 27 November as the International Day for the Elimination of Child, Early and Forced Marriage. Led by Sierra Leone and its First Lady, Dr. Fatima Maada Bio, and co-sponsored by more than sixty countries, the resolution goes further than symbolism, it names child marriage as a human rights violation and, in its own words, a form of child sexual abuse. UNICEF data estimates that around 12 million girls are married before the age of eighteen globally every year, and an estimated 640 million women and girls alive today were married as children. Progress has been made over the last two decades, but not nearly fast enough, and the world is not on track to eliminate child marriage by 2030.
In the United States, around 315,000 children were legally married between 2000 and 2021, some as young as ten. More than two in every 1,000 American girls aged 15 to 17 were married each year over that period, and the overwhelming majority of minors who married were girls marrying adult men, on average more than four years older. At least one in five of these marriages took place at an age, or involved an age difference, that would otherwise have fallen within the relevant state’s definition of a sex crime. Despite growing efforts to change the law, child marriage remains legal in a majority of states.
Recent reporting from Afghanistan is a painful reminder of how quickly girls’ rights can disappear. New Taliban restrictions do more than permit child marriage. They reinforce a system in which girls lose not only their childhoods, but also meaningful access to education, autonomy and the possibility of leaving abusive relationships.
I decided to get married this year, well into my fourth decade. No one in my family ever pressured me to marry. I was expected to study, to work, to travel, to think for myself. I was given the freedom to build a career or not, to make mistakes, to fall in and out of love and, eventually, to get married when it felt right.
Sure, the contrast between Nani’s life and my own is striking. Yet, I do not tell our stories to judge one generation against another. History asks different things of different people. Women’s lives have always been shaped by the worlds into which they are born. Nor do I tell them to romanticise child marriage.
But I do ask: How do we enable and protect a child’s space to discover who they are, before being asked to become someone’s wife? We need to figure this out to make sure that millions of girls today have a choice about their future.
It would be easy to believe this is someone else’s problem. It is not. Child marriage is not confined to one culture, one religion or one region. Governments have had international legal cover to end it for decades — the 1962 UN Convention on Consent to Marriage set out minimum-age principles, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by nearly every country on earth, defines a child as anyone under eighteen. Yet domestic law has lagged for generations. Until February 2023, children as young as sixteen could legally marry in England and Wales with parental consent, under a loophole that survived nearly a century. The Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022 finally closed it and eighteen is now the minimum age of marriage. Arranging a marriage for a child is a criminal offence, whether or not coercion can be proved. Yet in 2025, the government’s Forced Marriage Unit provided support in 406 cases, 40 per cent of which involved children aged seventeen or younger. The change in the law matters, but the figures are a reminder that legislation, national or international, does not make the practice disappear on its own.
Conflict, poverty, displacement and climate change continue to push families towards impossible choices. Laws that should protect children often fail to do so and even when a country like the UK closes its loopholes, the practice migrates underground rather than disappearing. That is, in part, why the UN felt it needed a day at all not to introduce a new idea, but to force governments back to a promise most of them made decades ago and have been slow to keep.
When we talk about child marriage, we often talk about numbers:12 million girls a year, 640 million women alive today, a resolution now on the UN calendar. I find myself thinking about Nani instead. I don’t first picture her as a wife or a mother. I picture the girl my grandfather saw sitting in a tree. A child, suspended for a moment between the life she had and the life that awaited her. She is climbing, playing, looking out across the fields. For a fleeting moment she belongs only to herself. She does not yet know that her life is about to change. She does not know that, decades later, her granddaughter will write about her or that the world she lived in would eventually call what happened to her a human rights violation, and try, however belatedly, to write a law against it.
My Nani never questioned the life she built. I never question her love for my grandfather. But love should never be confused with choice, and a resolution should never be confused with protection. A day on the calendar does not, by itself, keep a girl in school, or out of a marriage, or in that tree a little longer. That work is slower and more local than any General Assembly vote. But it must start somewhere. Every girl deserves the chance to climb the tree first and the law, at every level, owes her the time to come down on her own.
iProbono’s factsheet about child marriage provides more information about the law that protects children in countries across South Asia.
