Working with Married Girls: the Experiences of Ghanaian Professionals on the Causes, Impact, and Interventions Pertaining to Child Marriage

Consequences of Early Marriage on Young Girl – A Systematic Review

“…Early marriage has made it difficult for child brides to take care of their families due to limited resources as the husband is the sole breadwinner of the family (John et al, 2019;Baba et al, 2020). Because most females are married off young, they are unable to acquire the essential skills to either find paid work or start a business that will help them provide for themselves and their children, and child brides remain unemployed due to their limited skills (Sarfo et al, 2020). A lack of reliable household income has led to sustainable and intergeneration poverty among the young couples and strengthened the poverty chain in the community that practices early marriage (Guglielmi et al, 2021;Susilo et al, 2021;Duadji & Tresiana, 2022), a married couple often have different core values about money.…”

“…Efevbera and Farmer (2021) and Hunersen et al (2021) emphasized that early marriage leads to poor outcomes for girls who give birth at a young age. For example, a young girl may experience miscarriages (Hunersen et al, 2021), inability to control urination or defecation, heart problems, bleeding complications, anemia during pregnancy, and difficulties giving birth (Sarfo et al, 2020;Elnakib et al, 2021;Susilo et al, 2021). These complications were most likely caused by the experience of rapid repeat pregnancy at a young age, with only one year and below of the gap between the first child and second child (Elnakib et al, 2022).…”

“…Childbearing and child-rearing can be exhausting and costly. Child brides did not have adequate knowledge to take care of children and resulting in an inability to properly care for their children at such young ages (Sarfo et al, 2020;Hunersen et al, 2021). Kohan et al (2021) showed that most child brides described difficulty in maintaining attachment with their unborn babies and infants as they did not have proper support from family, no guides to nurture their children, and they were unprepared for the unwanted early pregnancy.…”

“…Abera et al ( 2020) and Baba et al ( 2020) revealed that children who married early often expressed their feelings which is something that they could not explain to everyone. Quantitative data from Guglielmi et al (2021) showed that girls often exhibited signs of psychological distress when they think about divorces, their identity crises, and psychological problems due to improper course of childhood and adolescence (Naghizadeh et al, 2021), yet they could not express their distress includes the experiences of frustration and prolonged stress (Sarfo et al, 2020), due to the fear that they will show a disrespect attitude towards the in-laws. Consequently, this unfavorable condition results in higher levels of depressive symptoms among the young married couple than those who marry later (Sezgin & Punamäki, 2020).…”