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Since 17-year-old Rehana was a child, she dreamt of supporting her family. An only child to parents struggling to make ends meet in Bangladesh, she says, “I always thought, I have no brother, who will look after my parents?” She had wanted to take on that responsibility herself, but at 14, her ambitions were put on hold when a powerful family in the community proposed marriage.
“I didn’t understand how to get married…I liked to study. I studied all the time,” she tells CNN.
Rehana, whose name has been changed, instead became one of an estimated 38 million girls in the country – and 650 million girls worldwide – who were married or in a union before they turned 18. Scroll down to read her full story below.
Rehana’s experience is one of more than 250 recorded as part of a new report publishing this week, shared exclusively with CNN, providing a window into the everyday lives of girls worldwide who married or entered unions as children – some as young as 12 years old. The unions concerned are informal marriages or cohabitations, unrecognized by law but regarded as official by communities.
The 2025 State of the World’s Girls report by global NGO Plan International reveals how these relationships leave girls vulnerable for the rest of their lives. It looked at 15 countries with high child marriage rates across Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, and found that in all, advocates believe such marriages and unions are going largely unchecked by authorities, despite there often being laws in place, while the needs of young brides are going unheard.
The researchers interviewed more than 250 girls who had married or entered a union before the age of 18 – now aged between 15 and 24 – as well as more than 240 child marriage activists. They found that a significant number are under the control of older spouses, face intimate partner violence and are not in education or employed. Many became mothers at a young age and have minimal agency in their lives, including in their sexual and reproductive choices.
The accounts also shed light on the varied drivers of child marriage, which may not always be forced by parents or communities but instead by social and economic circumstances or lack of alternative options. And among those surveyed, more than one in four girls had sought a divorce, left their marriage or had their marriages end – but later found themselves unprepared for this new and uncertain future.
“Girls are entering child marriage for many different reasons, and then they are choosing where possible to leave it. This underlines what we have been saying for many years, that child marriage doesn’t offer a better path for girls,” says Zoe Birchall, global lead of campaigns and mobilisation at Plan International. But “girls can face stigma and abuse because of leaving a marriage from their communities,” she says.
CNN spoke with three girls in Bangladesh, Zambia and Ecuador – married or in unions by the ages of 14, 16 and 15 respectively – who shared the realities of the environment they grew up in and why they saw marriage as a way to improve their future.
Names have been changed and illustrations are anonymous to ensure their safety.
Rehana, Bangladesh
Married at 14, divorced at 15. She says she faced daily intimidation and abuse.
Petra Eriksson
“When I got married, I was very scared. I was only 14 years old,” says Rehana, now 17, who lives in an urban slum in Bangladesh. Here, marriage this young is common, she says, despite child marriage laws in place since 1929. The young bride recalls having to sleep in a new house with a new family soon after the wedding, having always slept with her mother at home until then. “My mother is like a best friend to me,” Rehana says.
Rehana explains that women and girls face regular harassment on the streets where she lives and one way families believe they can protect their daughters is to marry them young. But conversely, she tells CNN, many young girls run away and get married themselves. Research shows this is often due to the fear of child marriage, with some girls choosing to elope with boyfriends of their own age rather be forced to marry an older man. Rehana’s mother, Farida, says that to prevent this, parents like herself feel pressured to marry their daughters even younger.
As a child, Rehana enjoyed studying and hoped to someday go into business, which her parents encouraged, until they received a proposal from an influential family in the community. They wanted her to marry their 17-year-old son. The union was a good opportunity for Rehana’s family, whose sole income came from their father, a rickshaw driver. They struggled to make ends meet, says Farida, but never compromised their daughter’s education.
The wealthy family seemed to offer good prospects and, importantly, the prospective in-laws promised Rehana’s parents their daughter would be taken care of and have her education funded. They also assured them she would not have to live with their son until she turned 18. The future mother-in-law agreed to all conditions, says Rehana: “Whatever we said, she said yes.”
A Muslim wedding took place within three weeks and the family say they altered documents to increase their daughters age and register the wedding legally. A local Plan expert confirmed this is commonplace.
Recalling the day, both Rehana and her mother become emotional. Rehana explains that she didn’t want to get married but would do anything her parents needed. Farida, also with tears in her eyes, describes how beautiful her daughter looked, how people remarked, “she’s so pretty. She’s like a doll.”
But soon after the union, Rehana says the promises were broken and the psychological abuse and harassment began.
Rehana says the family kept her at their home for long periods and barred her from attending school, questioning why she needed an education when they would not let her work anyway. Soon they also stopped her from seeing friends, pressured her to wear a burqa and intimidated her into complying with their expectations, using their connections to monitor her behavior and journeys while out.
“It was very tough for me,” Rehana says. Her husband also abused her physically and mentally, leaving her feeling trapped, she recounts.
Her mother says she realized within a few months that she had made the wrong decision for her daughter, but the idea of a divorce terrified her due to the stigma Rehana would face.
But as the one-year anniversary of the marriage approached, Farida decided enough was enough. She didn’t want to leave Rehana alone with her husband’s family anymore, and divorce papers were served. The in-laws tried intimidating Farida, she says, but she was determined to secure her daughter’s freedom. “They were very angry about it,” Farida says. They said many false things about Rehana and that “she’s in contact with someone else,” but Farida says at that point, “I didn’t care about anything.”
The mother and daughter didn’t leave their home for at least a week after the divorce was finalized, they explain, to avoid verbal abuse as rumors about Rehana spread within the community.
Now almost an adult, Rehana has finished secondary school and is continuing her education. She has also set up a small business selling jewellery. Her mother says the divorce was a life-saving decision.
“I have learned a lot from my daughter… I have done a lot of bad things to her,” she adds, but says she is thankful she was ultimately able to bring her daughter home.
Diana, Zambia
He gave me things I asked for. When we lived together, everything changed.
Petra Eriksson
“Life was difficult,” recalls 19-year-old Diana, one of four children whose parents farmed maize, soybeans, and groundnut for a living. She loved her family but remembers how they struggled to get by, often eating just one meal a day.
So, three years ago, at the age of 16, when an older man named Jacob started paying her attention, it was a draw. “I was excited about dating him, like when I asked him like I need something, he used to give me,” including money, she says.
A few months into the relationship, Diana became pregnant by the then 20-year-old and decided to move in with him in a nearby village – which in her community equates to marriage – telling her parents she was visiting her aunt then ceasing all contact. “I was afraid that if my parents know that I’m pregnant, they will kill me,” she tells CNN.
Under Zambian law, marriages under the age of 18 are illegal, but this omits informal unions like Diana’s, which experts say bypass legislation, making them more challenging to address.
Diana says her life stopped being fun once she moved in with Jacob. She had left all her friends behind and was too afraid of her parents discovering she was pregnant if she went to school, so she quit. Jacob also feared her parents finding out, Diana says. “He was afraid they would arrest him.”
The teenager also “started seeing things changing” in Jacob, she says, recalling that he made her do all the housework, drank alcohol excessively, and became verbally and physically abusive.
“The way we used to live when we were dating” completely changed, Diana explains. “Everything was hard, he was not working, so life was difficult for us.”
At six months pregnant, Diana says she was fed up and decided to return home – despite the consequences she could face. That morning, she told Jacob she was going to fetch water and left quietly, walking the eight-kilometer (five-mile) journey home.
Once home, and visibly pregnant, Diana explained everything to her parents, who at first, she says “were angry with me. They shouted at me.” But after pleading with them to “forgive me for what I did,” she was relieved to be accepted.
When the young mom gave birth, Jacob was not in the picture. With the support of her parents, she returned to school, where she received a mixed welcome. “Some of my friends, they used to give me good advice,” she says, while others “laughed at me” and said “bad words.”
Before she became pregnant, Diana dreamed of becoming an engineer. Now, she says, she’ll take “any job” available.
Jen, Ecuador
“I was a child. I didn’t know anything about life.”
Petra Eriksson
Growing up in a rural area of Ecuador, Jen met her partner Yan five years ago – when she was 13 years old, and he was 20. She explains this type of union is common and generally accepted in her community.
The now 18-year-old shares that the older man had been kind and paid her a lot of attention. “He was always giving me support and we just had open conversations,” she tells CNN, recounting how they talked for hours about their lives. “He was not aggressive, he was a kind man, and he is still like that.”
Jen would tell her friends about Yan, she says, but not her parents, “They didn’t like him because he’s older than me, that’s why I only used to tell my friends.”
After two years, they decided to move in together, which in her community is seen as an informal union equal to marriage.
In response, her parents “wanted to send him to jail because I was underage,” Jen says. The age of sexual consent in Ecuador is 14 years, while their union would not be legally recognised as the legal minimum age to marry or live together is 18.
But Jen says she assured her parents she would continue studying “because that was their main concern,” and explains that in her community there are many “12 or 13-year-old girls that are also living with their partners.” Although a parent may object initially, they tend to eventually accept, she tells CNN.
Referring to Yan as her husband, Jen says she values their relationship but has come to recognize that she acted too impulsively. When she moved in with Yan, she also moved in with his father and at just 15, Jen found household responsibilities piled on her. She did all the housework, such as cleaning, laundry, making breakfast, “and then I went to school. And then when I arrived from school, I started cooking dinner for myself and my partner, and sometimes also for my father-in-law.”
Now she thinks they should have stayed “boyfriend and girlfriend” and not moved in together. “I was a child, it was a quick decision, I didn’t know anything about life.”
At 17, she became pregnant. It wasn’t something she expected. “I have some cysts in my ovaries, so I was told that I was not going to be able to have children,” Jen says; as a result, the couple didn’t use contraceptives. In anticipation of parenthood, they moved in with Jen’s mother.
Jen shares how she had once enjoyed school activities like cheerleading and being part of a band. Before the informal marriage she remembers mostly playing with her siblings and having fun: “I didn’t have to worry about anything. My mother was in charge of everything.”
Now responsibilities at home take up most of the young mother’s time, but she managed to finish school and hopes to go to college next year. “My mom is very supportive,” she says.
No options but child marriage
UNICEF figures show that every year 12 million underage girls around the world enter marriages, including informal unions, with a 2025 report revealing the highest levels are now in sub-Saharan Africa. Data indicates some progress in recent decades, with child marriages falling from more than one in three women worldwide between the ages of 20 and 24 reporting they had been married as children to under one in five in 2021.
This progress is mostly due to a significant decline in South Asia, which previously had the highest rates. The UN agency says the drop has been particularly pronounced in India, attributing this in part to a focused approach to girls’ education, government spending on girls, and increased public awareness on the illegality and harms of child marriage.
But multiple experts told CNN that the stories of Rehana, Diana and Jen, alongside the hundreds of others interviewed for the State of the World’s Girls report, show that economic insecurity and limited opportunities for adolescent girls are still key drivers of child marriage worldwide – and that legal protections are not being adequately enforced to protect their rights.
“The routes into child marriage or unions are different,” says Plan International’s Birchell. “A girl may feel that she is coming to this with some choice, but ultimately…we still see these girls are going into these child marriages because they feel they don’t have a better option.” Birchell believes the report demonstrates that there is no traditional form of child marriage. “It’s way more nuanced…we have to think, if these girls had all the options in front of them, if they were able to access education fully, if they had the money and availability to choose otherwise, would they have done that?”
The most common reasons girls in the study say they married young are economic hardship, cultural norms or pressure from family. Among the girls interviewed, 25% say they had no say in the decision to marry and 35% dropped out of school right after or due to their marriage. Among the girls who shared the age of their partners, almost half (45%) were married to men more than five years older than them. The report noted girls in several countries cited difficulties around contraception access and agency in their decision-making around this.
45% of the girls surveyed got married to a man five or more years older
Each dot represents one of the 208 girls who shared the age of their partners as part of the research. Ninety-three girls reported being married to men who were at least five years older than themselves. – Plan International, CNN
More than one in 10 girls interviewed also disclosed abuse or violence by their partner; however, as they were not directly asked this and were often speaking within the home, the NGO believes this likely does not reflect the true scale of the problem. Of those who reported such violence, 85% were married to men at least five years their senior.
Source: Plan International – Petra Eriksson
Source: Plan International – Petra Eriksson
Zaki Wahhaj, professor of development economics at King’s College London, highlights that the accounts of the girls interviewed by CNN reveal a failure of their countries to safeguard these girls. “Jen, Diana, and Rehana were placed in situations involving abuse, exploitation, or serious risks to their safety and wellbeing,” he tells CNN. “All three countries have a legal minimum age for marriage, but these safeguards failed, bypassed through informal unions or the use of falsified documents. Although it is encouraging that the girls’ families ultimately supported them and helped improve their situations, family support cannot always be assumed.”
For countries with child marriage laws in place, reports show the challenges governments face in enforcing them, due to gaps in the laws themselves, exceptions in the minimum age of marriage and community backlash. This is the case in the three countries where the girls CNN spoke to are based, for example the laws in Ecuador, Bangladesh and Zambia do not directly reference informal unions. In Bangladesh, while the legal age of marriage may be 18, loopholes allow these to take place such as the Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2017 allowing child marriage with parental and judicial consent if deemed to be in the best interest of the minor. Cultural norms around the practice and the complicity of local officials also hinder progress, according to the Centre for Reproductive Rights.
Government agencies in Bangladesh, Ecuador and Zambia did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Veronica Kamanga Njikho, senior adviser for child protection at UNICEF, emphasizes that the experiences of these girls “reflect a broader reality: child marriage increases risks of violence, economic vulnerability, school dropout, adolescent pregnancy, and poor mental health.”
This new research, she says, helps to identify what’s needed to improve their lives. “Laws alone are not enough. Without enforcement, accountability, and broader social change, child marriage persists in practice,” she explains. “We know what works: keeping girls in school, supporting families economically, enforcing laws that ban child marriage, and working with communities to change harmful social norms.”
Credits
Commissioning Edi tor
Meera Senthilingam
Copy Editor
Hannah Strange
Data Editor
Carlotta Dotto
Reporters
Sashikala VP, Carlotta Dotto
Illustrator
Petra Eriksson
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