An empirical exploration of female child marriage determinants in Indonesia

Child marriage is a significant health and children’s rights concern in many low- and middle- income countries (LMICs). Globally, one in six adolescent girls between the ages of 15 and 19 years is married or in union, and as many as 700 million women were married as child brides in 2014 [1]. Child marriage, also known as early or forced marriage, is defined as any marriage in which either of the partners is under 18 years of age, with or without consent [2]. It significantly alters not only the lives of these girls themselves but also the life trajectories of their children. Global evidence shows, for example, that child marriage exposes girls to higher risk of maternal mortality. Complications during childbirth and pregnancy are one of the leading causes of death amongst adolescent girls [3, 4]. Children born to young mothers are also more likely to have poor nutritional and other health outcomes [5]. A study conducted in five LMICs found that children whose mothers were 19 or younger when they were born have a 20% to 30% higher risk of preterm birth and low birth weight [6, 7]. Married girls are also at greater risk of dropping out of school [8] and may face an increased risk of intimate partner violence [9, 10].

In September 2015, the General Assembly of the United Nations committed to targets eliminating all practices causing specific harm to women and girls, including child marriage (Target 5.3, Goal 5 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs) [11]. To achieve this target by 2030, governments will require rigorous scientific data on the prevalence of child marriage in their countries and its structural determinants, to inform meaningful investment in program and policy responses.

However, most countries, especially LMICs, have very little data on the prevalence of child marriage or of other traditional practices harmful to girls [12]. Even less information is available about their (context-specific) structural and behavioral determinants, although some evidence is emerging. Child marriage appears to be more common in LMICs in comparison to high-income countries [13]. Unequal gender norms may drive child marriage. For example, some researchers have found that countries and societies with high gender inequality (e.g. laws and customs that exclude girls from decision-making or economic and political rights) are more likely to feature high prevalence of child marriage [14]. Education is commonly found to be a protective factor, both globally as well as in in studies from South Asia, with child brides consistently having lower education levels than women married over the age of 18 [15, 16]. Minimum marriage age laws have been shown to protect against child marriage [17]. Finally, poverty and rural residence are found to increase the risk of child marriage in every region of the world [18]. However, it should be noted that most research to date on determinants of child marriage is associational and thus fails to establish a causal link between background factors and adverse child marriage outcomes.

Most empirical research on child marriage has focused on South Asian and African countries where a high percentage of females marry before age 18. In contrast, relatively little research on the topic has been conducted in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, most studies are limited to a specific geographic area and little nationally representative data or analysis is available. What data exists point to a significant problem: an estimated 17% of Indonesian girls are married before the age of 18, according to the most recent national Demographic Health Survey (DHS) conducted in 2012 [19]. According to UNICEF, Indonesia ranks approximately in the middle for countries with available data on marriage before the age of 18 in East Asia and Pacific region, with Laos and Solomon Islands ranking the highest at 37% and 28.3%, respectively and Mongolia and Vietnam ranking the lowest at 6.2% and 12.3% respectively [20]. However, due to the large population, Indonesia has one of the highest burdens of child marriage in the region and contributes substantially to the overall global burden of child brides [20, 21]. Although trends are promising, with median age at first marriage increasing among ever-married women age 25 to 49 (from an estimated 17.7 years at first marriage in 1991 to 20.1 in 2012), levels are still unacceptably high. A 2016 report by the National Statistics Bureau and UNICEF Indonesia finds that using bivariate analysis, child marriage is associated with rural residence, poorer housing conditions and households with lower levels of expenditure; all categories associated with poverty [21]. However, insufficient analysis is available to explain the wide variance in child marriage rates across the country, including within districts and provinces.

Indonesia, with more than 255 million people, is home to the world’s largest Muslim population. Geographically and culturally diverse, the country has emerged as a significant economic and political power. While still a LMIC, annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth has averaged almost 6% in recent years [22]. Despite these advances, children in Indonesia face a number of serious challenges. Some studies claim that as many as half of Indonesian children live in poverty [23]. Under-five mortality is showing gradual improvement and is currently at 40 deaths per 1000 live births, although some eastern provinces show much higher rates [19]. Stunting amongst children below five years remains high, at roughly 37% [24]. Maternal mortality is at 359 deaths per 100,000 live births and has been on the increase [19].

The United Nations Committee on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) has urged the Indonesian government to take urgent action to implement stronger protections for girls against all forms of violence, including child marriage [25]. Although Indonesia ratified the UNCRC in 1990, its laws protecting children from marriage are inconsistent [26]. For example, the 2002 Child Protection Law prohibits any child from getting married before 18 years, but the minimum age for marriage (with parental consent) is 16 for girls and 19 for boys by Article 7 of the 1974 Marriage Law. The Marriage Law also provides opportunities for dispensation, allowing parents to marry their children legally at a younger age, even without their expressed consent. Families may also choose to adhere to cultural law (adat) in Indonesia, in which ideas of minimum age of marriage and consent differ widely with the various adat systems and regions across the country. Traditional attitudes about gender and women’s role in society can also influence child marriage. One study from 2015 finds that parents and the community may arrange female marriage as a remedy for rape [27].

In this paper, we analyze nationally representative data from Indonesia to examine structural factors predicting child marriage dynamics among a sample of women aged 20 to 24 to inform policy and programs. Understanding determinants of child marriage in Indonesia is of high relevance to the global understanding of child marriage dynamics as Indonesia contributes significantly to the regional and global burden of child marriage. Indonesia is perceived as a high-performing economy, however there are still significant challenges for women and children that prevent sustainable development for all its citizens. A multidimensional approach to understanding, and addressing, child marriage is needed. The analysis contributes to the literature in two main ways. First, to our knowledge, this is the first analysis of determinants of child marriage using a multivariate analysis of nationally representative, large-scale data. As Indonesia is a diverse nation, it is important from a policy perspective to situate the findings of smaller scale and regionally specific findings in a national context. Second, empirical analysis of marital preferences and attitudes are virtually nonexistent, but are thought to perpetuate child marriage dynamics at the societal level. Therefore, it is useful to understand what observable underlying factors are associated with preferences and harmful attitudes among unmarried young females. We conclude with a discussion of policy and program opportunities to reduce rates of child marriage as well as reflections on a research agenda to inform policy and programming efforts to end child marriage.

The data for this analysis come from two related sources. The main analysis, on prevalence and structural determinants of child marriage, uses data from the 2012 Indonesia DHS, implemented by Statistics Indonesia (Badan Pusat Statistik, BPS) in collaboration with the National Population and Family Planning Board and the national Ministry of Health, with technical assistance from ICF International [19]. The DHS provides nationally representative data primarily from females of reproductive age (15–49) and are typically implemented approximately every five years in LMICs to monitor and understand population health and demographics. Further information, including information on sampling and questionnaire design, is available on the DHS website (http://​www.​dhsprogram.​com/). As a special addition to the DHS 2012, a complementary data collection, the Adolescent Reproductive Health (ARH) survey was conducted, which sampled never-married women and men aged 15–24 and covered topics including marital aspirations and knowledge and risk behavior regarding sexual activities and HIV, among others [28].

Following international definitions [29], for the main analysis we focused on indicators of the following child marriage outcomes: (1) ever married or cohabited, (2) married or cohabited before the age of 18, and (3) married or cohabited before the age of 16.¹ The DHS questions eliciting information on these items are presented in Table 1. Similarly, per international standards on child marriage statistics, we limited the DHS analysis to a sample of women aged 20 to 24, as these women have passed through the full age range(s) for classification of child marriage. There is also some evidence suggesting that women in older age cohorts have higher disclosure rates for early transition indicators as compared to younger women in the 15–19 age range [30]. We supplemented the child marriage analysis using the full ARH sample to analyze the determinants of marital-age preferences and attitudes approving child marriage among unmarried female respondents aged between 15 and 24. We focused on two questions, relating to self-reported preferences on the future age of marriage of the respondent and attitudes around the best age of marriage for females in general (Table 1). In our construction, attitudes are defined as an individual’s favorable or unfavorable disposition towards an object or practice, independent of what may be deemed appropriate in a particular social context [31].² Note that since the DHS and ARH samples originate from different sampling frames (the latter being never married youth), they are not comparable or linked in our analysis in any way.

We conducted a multivariate probit regression analysis to explore structural determinants of child marriage outcomes. A probit model is a standard regression when using binary indicators (taking the value of 0 or 1) to estimate the probability that an observation falls into a specific category [32]. The probit model is similar to a logistic regression model, with some advantages in terms of interpretation as coefficients can be expressed as marginal effects and interpreted as percentage point (pp) changes with respect to the outcome of interest. We assume a standard model:

Where Pr is the probability (e.g. of child marriage) and ɸ is the cumulative distribution function of the standard normal distribution. The parameters (ß) are estimated using maximum likelihood. Operationally, if we assume Y* is a latent variable which we observe when Y* > 0 (= 1), and otherwise as equal to zero, then we can estimate the following model:where the error term is normally distributed, ε ~ N (0, σ ²),

We select a vector of independent variables (β) based on available underlying structural characteristics hypothesized to be linked to early marriage. Focusing on structural determinants mitigates against the possibility they are behavioral choice factors or likely to be reversely casually linked to early marriage [33]. Independent variables include certain individual characteristics (age indicators in years; education attainment in years; number of siblings in childhood household; exposure to media including radio, newspaper, and television), household characteristics (wealth quintiles), and place of residence (urban/rural). Household wealth quintiles were pre-computed in using principal component analysis and including household-level durable asset ownership and housing quality indicators (e.g. floor, wall and roof type, access to water and sanitation). In all analyses, we adjusted for province fixed effects (across 33 provinces,³ with base category Jakarta), however suppressed coefficients for provinces in Table output due to the large number and instead reported a joint test of significance. Province fixed effects may absorb time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity related to, for instance, ethnic and religious diversity as well as differences in the level of development between provinces. Coefficients from probit models are reported as marginal effects (Tables 3 and 5). All analyses accounted for the complex survey design and sampling weight, with standard errors clustered at the primary sampling unit (PSU) level.

There are two differences to note between the DHS and ARH analysis. First, as the preferred age at marriage outcome is continuous, we utilized an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression approach, and second, as the number of siblings is not available in the ARH data, we omitted this determinant from the analysis. Finally, for all other models, to understand if our results are sensitive to our choice of probit specification, we replicated our analysis using linear probability models and found qualitatively similar results (available upon request). The study is exempt from ethical review, as our method involved conducting secondary analysis of publicly available and de-identified data.

This study adds to the growing evidence on the epidemiology of child marriage in Southeast Asia, and globally. Our findings confirm that a large proportion of females are still entering into child marriage and cohabitation situations in Indonesia, placing young mothers and their children at significant risk. We find that across outcomes, many of the same risk and protective factors are significant predictors of child marriage related outcomes. Like other studies, our findings suggest that in Indonesia, education is a strong protective factor against child marriage and against certain harmful marital preferences and attitudes. These findings indicate that, all else being equal, policies that promote girls’ completion of secondary schooling could lead to meaningful decreases in child marriage. The protective effects of urban residence and wealth confirm and build upon the findings from other studies from Indonesia [22, 36] and suggest that the government and partners make greater investments in social protection and poverty eradication. Poor households may see child marriage as economically beneficial in the short-term, but it does not improve the economic status of the household over the long-term or provide financial security for the future, potentially due to the lost financial capital of married girls and women not working [37]. Indeed, Indonesian women are less likely to have ever worked for pay and women work fewer hours than men [38]. From this perspective, child marriage in Indonesia likely maintains or exacerbates poverty, rather than alleviating it. Importantly, our findings indicate that nearly universally, unmarried females (aged 15 to 24) have attitudes rejecting child marriage and would prefer to enter into partnerships as adults. This is potentially indicative of a growing norm that the practice of child marriage should be stopped. Together, these findings provide compelling arguments in support of broader child marriage prevention efforts in Indonesia, including potential legislative reform of the Indonesian Marriage Law.

There are several limitations of this study primarily resulting from the observational nature of the analysis. As the data are cross-sectional, we were not able to track respondents over time to explore whether factors evident at earlier ages are causally linked to later marriage outcomes—or, similarly, if early marriage is causally linked to adverse later-life health or well-being outcomes. For example, while education for adolescent girls is a protective factor, and should continue to be promoted, the direction of the relationship between marriage and education needs to be further explored in order to accurately inform programming options. While it appears that females who receive more education are protected from child marriage, child marriage may on the other hand often become a reason to leave school. We find that the number of siblings a female had while growing up decreases the likelihood of child marriage, which is counterintuitive and merits further investigation as it may be an artifact of co-linearity with other omitted variables.⁵ In addition, there may be relevant risk factors we were not able to identify, for example religious and ethnic diversity or gender norms at the community level. Despite these limitations, the data are nationally representative and therefore have potential to inform more robust policy and programming recommendations based on simple analyses showing population-level dynamics.

Child marriage has harmful life-long effects, both for the current and future generations. Like other studies from Indonesia, this analysis shows that similar structural factors are important in predicting both child marriage, as well as preferences and attitudes surrounding the practice. A recent systematic review including grey literature identified 11 high quality interventions and evaluations, six of which had some positive impact on reducing child marriage or increasing the age of marriage and can provide guidance in selecting which intervention design is likely to be successful in a given context such as Indonesia [39]. Our study suggests that the Government of Indonesia, private sector and civil society partners should prioritize secondary education for all girls and boys, and ensure that social protection financing is sufficient to reach poor households where vulnerable girls reside. The Indonesian Village Law provides an opportunity to leverage local government resources in this regard, by allocating a significant amount of funds for social services (up to 1 billion Indonesian Rupiah) per village. Strong civil society voices, and evidence around child marriage, including strategies to eliminate it, can influence these allocations. Specific opportunities for improving girls’ access to protective, including economic, assets should also be explored in line with good practice internationally [40]. In addition, the Government and other actors, including religious and traditional leaders, could initiate public awareness campaigns and mobilize community engagement to disseminate messages about children’s rights, gender inequality and the harms of child marriage. Based on our findings, these campaigns could build on the knowledge that a significant portion of the population that have attitudes and preferences against marriage before 18 years. Finally, as Indonesia is a highly diverse country with a range of religious, linguistic, and ethno cultural groups, the results here have highlighted the importance of investigating the specific factors that drive child marriage at the regional level, with extensive reference to dynamics such as religious affiliation.

Ending child marriage is a critical gender target of the SDGs and the global 2030 agenda. Already, Indonesia has embraced the SDG targets, reflecting commitments to the SDGs in its development planning and budgeting processes ahead of many of its neighboring countries. To achieve the 2030 agenda, however, policymakers must take bold action to place equity concerns and the rights and protection of girls in particular, at the heart of future development efforts. Future research efforts should prioritize rigorous testing of gender-transformative education and economic strengthening interventions, including cost-effectiveness considerations to better understand how interventions and policies can be leveraged to deliver on ending child marriage in Indonesia and globally.