This anti-child bride thing is part of a radical feminist movement. Here are the facts for anyone who cares to consider them:
-- Worldwide, throughout history, people have normally been considered adults at ages as young as 12 and as old as 21. But the ones on the older end of the scale (17 to 21) are actually an anomaly -- most societies have given people only 12 to 16 years to grow up and take on the mantle of adulthood.
-- "Extended childhood" is the exclusive province of wealthy, urbanized nations, in which most people do not live off the land.
-- The people who run this campaign would have you believe that marrying young causes one to be poor. They are confusing cause and effect. Actually, it is the poor people who are most likely to marry young. This is because it provides an advantage to the family or tribal structure. Life expectancies aren't all that long anyway in many of these places, and in an agrarian society where people are living off the land, there is not the kind of opportunity to do other things as there are in Westernized, wealthy nations. But interestingly enough, if you go back even 100 years in American history, you will find many young women marrying between ages 12-18. Same was true in many European countries. People who are farming would have a different outlook on this issue than an 18-year old heading off to Columbia University. If your choices are to keep working on your family's farm and babysit your younger siblings, or start your own family, many would choose the latter option.
-- The death rate of young women from pregnancies again confuses cause and effect. In places where people marry this young, these are the same places that have much lower quality of health care and higher death rates from all causes. A 25-year old in rural India is just as likely to die in childbirth as a 16-year old in that same place.
-- Teens having babies hit an epidemic proportion in the United States about 15 years ago but is on the decline now. Many of these young women wanted a baby so much that they were willing to go to extremes. One undercover article exposed a pact between high school girls in Salem MA to get pregnant, and they found a homeless guy who would knock them up so they could get pregnant. This has happened also in the other industrialized nations that forbid "child marriage". Just how is it better for society if a young, unmarried woman has a baby than if a young woman who desires a family gets married to an older man who is willing and able to provide for one?
-- Teens who get pregnant out of wedlock in western nations are much poorer relative to their peers than those who marry young in third-world countries. In those places where this is going on, pretty much everybody is poor (at least by Western standards).
Here is a final question that is food for thought?
Why are these people trying to solve the social problems of cultures half a world away while they refuse to look at pressing issues right in their own cultures?