Dominican Republic: President signs a bill to ban "child marriage"

Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader has approved a bill that officially banned child marriages in the country.

The Caribbean nation has the largest of Latin America's biggest rates of child marriage and informal early unions - typically where a girl resides with an aged man - according to the United Nations (U.N.) Children's Fund, UNICEF.

The Dominican Republic needs to improve its culture so that women actually appear as more than housewives or just brides for this week's ban on child marriage to work, girls' rights protectors announced.

"Child marriage and early employees are viewed as usual in society. It is motivated by machismo that marks the position of a woman to be just a mom and wife," said Rosa Elcarte, UNICEF's agent in the Dominican Republic.

"Ending early unions will need years of work to change cultural norms," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding this will also involve working with men, children, and their children to promote change.

Women in the age groups of 20 to 24 were married or in an informal union before they were 18, government stastics reveal.

The U.N. declared an expected 12 million girls globally are given every year before the age of 18 which adds to health, training, and abuse risks and increases the chance of intergenerational poverty.

This figure is set to rise as growing poverty as a result of the new coronavirus pandemic could move more parents to wed off their daughters early, ending decades of work to end child marriage.

"Our girls and adolescents will be preserved ... and cannot be forced into marriage in their childhood or youth, which in the past was often carried out by parents and legally allowed," said Hernandez, an associate director with IJM.

"The law of this law will help to directly increase the occasions for girls' human progress (and) to decrease the cycle of poverty," said Virginia Saiz, head of girls' rights group, Plan International, in the Dominican Republic.