Legal And Institutional Strengths To Ending Child Marriage In Eritrea

Eritrea is one among many countries to embrace UN treaties and convention's via declaring female genital cutting and child marriage illegal.However,child marriage is still prevalent ranking Eritrea among the top 20 countries with the highest child marriage in the world(UNFPA,2014,and UNICEF,2005).Meanwhile,child marriage disrupts many marriage legislation such as marriageable age,and violates multiple children's rights.Marriage patterns and legitimacy in Eritrea can be categorized as;marriage through tradition,religious marriage,and marriage accomplished through municipality office.And all three have legal recognition.The study have hypothesized and later found out that;varied categorical and conceptual perception of the age of child among policy-makers/NGOs and the local community,multiple legal marriage legitimacy procedures,weak institutional linkage and/or cooperation,and also,lack of strong law enforcement toward child marriage are among the chronic pathological problems for combating child marriage.The research used Qualitative research approach through FGD,in-depth interviews and ethnographic studies.Data is thematically and conceptually analyzed by identifying key ideas,local and/or indigenous perceptions,conceptual and theoretical arguments,legal and child rights legislation and the like.Amid other theories,John Rawls's theory of justice and Structural functional approaches are utilized.Hence,I synthesized‘Strength of the Weakest Link'(SWL)an approach that determines the operational health of the whole parts of the legal and institutional system.The findings further indicated that legal marriage accomplishment facilitated through religious recognitions and registration have been the conventional choice of people across the country,and it is found out to be the main source of child marriage(weakest link).Conceptualization of marriage,family,and child in Eritrea are very much consistent across religions,localities,age groups,and ethnicities.Child is conceptualized as someone from the age of 1 until mean average 13 years,or generally for girls until the onset of first menarche.Child marriage is,therefore,conceived to be a marriage below the mean average age of 13 years.Participants from Urban residents showed a relatively better understanding of child marriage and the legal marriageable age in Eritrea.Adolescent boys and girls show a relative lack of basic knowledge of child rights.Finally,execution of explicit punishable law instrumentation to address transgression of the law(i.e.child marriage),cooperation and centrality of institutional operation upon legal marriage legitimacy,upgrading marriageable age in customary laws,religious institutions to ease cultural and religious constraints,application of the models I proposed at the micro and macro levels are key analytical outcomes of the research to pursue legal and institutional efficiency for ending child marriage.