Re-emphasizing the individual components of 'child, early, and forced marriage'

Efforts to eliminate 'child, early, and forced marriage', human rights violations with a wide range of harmful consequences, have intensified in the past twenty years as part of a growing social movement toward gender equality. The compound phrase 'child, early, and forced marriage' has become the preferred rhetoric in recent years and communicates a range of potentially harmful aspects of marriage, including the timing and consensuality of the event. However, we argue that two of the three component terms in 'child, early, and forced marriage' are not uniformly understood and, as a result, have not been adequately taken up in research, policy, or programming. In this review, we describe the history of this term and how different institutions define its individual components. We demonstrate that, in practice, 'child, early, and forced marriage' is often simplified to child marriage alone because this concept has a shared definition that is readily quantifiable. We recommend that clear definitions of early and forced marriage be developed and consistently applied alongside child marriage to further progress toward the overarching aim of improving gender equality.