Every second girl in Roma settlements is married or lives in a common-law marriage, every sixth got married before the age of 15, and 108,000 girls and women who married before the age of 18 live in Serbia, UNICEF announced in its report “Child Marriage and Adolescent Pregnancies in Serbia.”
“Early marriages often lead to dropping out of education and adolescent pregnancies, which is supported by the fact that every third girl from the poorest Roma settlements gives birth before reaching adulthood, and three percent of girls from the general population also go to the maternity ward,” the UNICEF report states, as reported today by the newspaper “Politika.”
They also stated that child marriages in Serbia most often affect children in Roma communities, where 56 percent of girls enter into marriage before adulthood, while in the general population, six percent of minors enter into child marriage.
“The fact that one-fifth of girls from the poorest social strata got married before the age of 18, while in the richest strata that percentage is significantly lower and amounts to 0.7 percent, indicates that poverty is causally related to early marriages,” the research states.
The authors of the research stated that it is necessary to define child marriage as a criminal offense against the sexual freedom of minors and urgently adopt the proposed amendments to the Criminal Code, Family Law, and the Law on Prevention of Domestic Violence, in order to ensure the legal protection of victims and the accountability of adult perpetrators and accomplices.
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Source: N1; Photo: Shutterstock