WORLD Legislative Repository for Child Marriage Laws 2023

The WORLD Legislative Repository for Child Marriage Laws 2023 provides the full-text legislation used to code the WORLD Child Marriage Laws 2023 dataset. The collection includes marriage laws, family laws, civil laws, gender equality laws, gender-based violence laws, criminal codes, and other relevant pieces of legislation governing minimum age of marriage, including with parental consent and under religious and customary law. All laws in effect as of May 2023 are included, whether they were recently passed or are decades old laws that are still in force. Files are separated by region and individual country files can be accessed by using Harvard Dataverse's explore function (the eye icon). The WORLD Child Marriage Laws 2023 dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/N4DNHL and was created to assess progress on laws prohibiting child marriage which jeopardizes educational attainment, health, economic opportunities, and gender equality through a systematic review of legislation governing the legal minimum age of marriage across all 193 UN countries as of May 2023. The dataset covers the legal minimum age of marriage for girls and boys, as well as exceptions to minimum ages with parental consent and under religious and customary law. The WORLD Policy Analysis Center (WORLD) is committed to improving the quantity and quality of globally comparative data available to policymakers, citizens, civil society, and researchers on laws and policies that work to support human rights, including economic opportunity, social and civic engagement, human health, development, well-being, and equity.