DiscussMormonism.com

subgenius wrote:The country where most requests came from was Mexico,

Child marriage was banned in Mexico in 2014, and while rates of child marriage around the world have fallen in recent decades, the numbers in Mexico haven't moved much.

According to the U.N. Women data, 25 percent of Mexican women ages 50 to 54 say they married as children, while 21 percent of women 20 to 24 report the same — a small change over more than a generation.

[...]


The group of women gathered at the community center estimate the average age for girls to marry in Coatecas Altas is 14 but say it happens as young as 11 or 12.

Graciela Garcia, 19, married her high school friend Jaime when she was 15. While she would have liked things to move more slowly and maybe date Jaime first, she says her father was "angry and possessive" — and that marriage was the only option if she wanted to spend time with Jaime.

But when Garcia talks about getting married, she doesn't use the word casarse which means "to get married" in Spanish. She says juntarse, which roughly means "to get together."

"In Mexico, informal unions are higher than formal marriage, and this is the main challenge we are facing because we don't have all the data to know what is happening around these informal marriages," says Ivonne Piedras from Save the Children Mexico. In these instances, the couple and/or their family agree that there will be a marriage, but paperwork is not filed until much later, if at all.

Formal or informal, there are a variety of drivers of child marriage in Mexico.

"We can't talk about a single driver of child marriage," says Piedras. "But one of the common drivers in each context ... is the way the woman is perceived and the way the woman is treated."

Some of it is tradition, especially in rural areas with larger indigenous populations, like in Coatecas Altas. But experts says it's unclear why there are high rates of child marriages in states like Coahuila or Zacatecas that don't have large indigenous populations.

"It even happens in Mexico City, where 13 percent of women here married as children," says Ana Guëzmes, the Mexico representative for U.N. Women. "The idea is that child marriage is something that happens elsewhere but not here."

Kevin Graham wrote:And suddenly a Mormon who thinks Mexicans are Lamanites, has a problem with an older man marrying a 15 year old from South of the border.

"the linked article speculates"

Well as long as it is speculation and not demonstrable fact, we'll just run with it. I mean, that's the Trumper thing to do right?