Local Crime and Early Marriage: Evidence from India

Abstract

This paper analyses whether living in a locality with high crime against women affects the probability of early marriage—that is, marriage before the legal age of marriage of girls. Using a nationally representative longitudinal data set and tackling the potential endogeneity of local crime rates, we find that perceived crime against women in the locality significantly increases the likelihood of early marriage of girls, while there is no such effect on boys of comparable age group. We also find no such effect of gender-neutral crimes (such as theft and robbery) on the likelihood of early marriage of girls. Moreover, we find that the relationship holds only in conservative households where the purdah system is practised, and also in the northern region of India, where patriarchal culture and gender norms are stronger than in the southern region. A sensitivity analysis assessing the potential impact of unobservable confounders suggests that our estimates are unlikely to be affected by omitted variable bias.

Keywords:

• crime
• early marriage
• gender
• India

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J12
• J13
• J16

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Elena Gross, Maria Lo Bue, Soham Sahoo, Kunal Sen, two anonymous referees and the Editor of this journal, and the participants of the UNU-WIDER workshop on women’s work for their valuable comments and discussions on the first draft of the paper. The author is also grateful to Dipanwita Ghatak for her excellent research assistance. The financial support for this research from the Economic and Social Research Council (grant ref no. ES/T010606/1), UK and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER), Finland is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Despite global efforts by international organizations, governments, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to raise awareness about the adverse effects of early marriage and the implementation of the incentives for parents to delay their daughters’ marriage, the prevalence of early marriage among female adolescents remains high, particularly in India.

2 While early marriage is an issue for both genders, it has particular implications for females (Jensen & Thornton, 2003; Maria Pesando & Abufhele, 2018). Early marriage has been associated with withdrawal of adolescent girls from education and limited engagement with the labour market, as well as low literacy rates, increased risk of sexual violence, and poor health outcomes for women and their offspring (Bhanji & Punjani, 2014; Nour, 2009; Zahangir & Kamal, 2011).

3 Using Demographic and Health Survey data from 48 countries for the period 1986–2010, a United Nations study found little improvement in the practice of child marriage in both rural and urban areas (UNFPA., 2012). It is also important to note two other stylized facts about female early marriage practices. Historically, the practice has been widely prevalent in China, the Middle East, and the Indian sub-continent (Dixon, 1971), and absent from Europe from at least the beginning of the eighteenth century, when reliable records began (Hajnal, 1965). Second, the practice is most prevalent today in the least developed countries (UNICEF, 2018).

4 A recent literature investigates the impact of early marriage on women’s labour force participation (Assaad et al., 2020; Dhamija & Roychowdhury, 2020; Sunder, 2019). The findings are mixed. Assaad et al. (2020) and Sunder (2019) provide evidence to support the claim that early marriage reduces labour market participation of women in MENA region and Uganda. However, a recent study by Dhamija and Roychowdhury (2020) on India finds a delay in women’s age at marriage has no significant causal effect on their labour market outcomes.

5 In India most marriages are arranged by the parents. In a 2018 survey of more than 160,000 households, 93% of married Indians reported that their marriage was arranged by the family. Just 3% had a ‘love marriage’ and another 2% described theirs as a ‘love-cum-arranged marriage’, which usually indicates that the relationship was set up by the families, and then the couple agreed to get married.

6 The Prohibition of Child Marriage (Amendment) Bill, 2021, passed by the Lok Sabha, sought to amend the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, to increase the minimum age of marriage for women from 18 to 21 years. However, this paper uses data from the year 2004-05 and 2011-12 when the legal minimum age of marriage for women was 18 years and for men was 21 years. Therefore, in this paper we use 18 years and 21 years age cut-off to define early marriage or marriage before legal age of marriage for women and men respectively.

7 Due to data limitations, we restrict the analysis of the overall sample including males to estimating the likelihood of marriage; analysis of early marriage is not conducted for the male sample.

8 The survey was carried out jointly by the University of Maryland and the National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi. The dataset is publicly available at https://ihds.umd.edu.

9 The primary sampling unit (PSU) in the survey is a village for rural area and a town for urban area. Our main variable of interest, crime against women, is defined at the PSU level. We use the words neighbourhood or locality or village/PSU interchangeably in this article.

10 An analysis using 17 year old girls in the sample is presented in Table S2 in supplementary document. The results remain unchanged.

11 Note that all women in our sample have crossed the legal age of marriage – therefore the outcome of early marriage is fully observed for all of them.

12 The rate of early marriage among women aged 19–23 is 26 per cent in India as estimated from another nationally representative survey, the National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) in 2012.

13 The standard deviation (SD) of perceived crime against women is 0.207 as presented in Table A2. Therefore, 1 SD increase in crime against women leads to 2.7 (1.4) percentage point increase in the likelihood of marriage (early marriage). Considering the average likelihoods of marriage (0.471) and early marriage (0.147), these estimates translate into 5.7 percent and 9.6 percent increase in the respective average likelihoods.

14 It is also possible to use district fixed effects and control for the district specific heterogeneity that can influence marriage decision and perceived gender specific crime in a locality. We conduct the analysis using district fixed effects. We find that the results mostly hold for $\mathrm{\text{MarriedBetweenRouds}}$ dummy although there is a fall in magnitude and the level of significance. However, the coefficient of crime against women becomes insignificant in the $\mathit{\text{EarlyMarriage}}$ regression, possibly because there is not enough variation left in our main explanatory variable after including district fixed effects in the regression. Since India is a large country where gender norms have great variation across states but are relatively homogenous within states, we believe that inclusion of state fixed effects would adequately control for the unobserved factors such as gender norms. Therefore, we present our main results from regressions using state fixed effects and present the results from district fixed effects in an appendix Table A3.

15 The study also found men from China, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Iran revealed the same preference, while the opposite prioritization was seen in each of the 24 European, North American, South American, and sub-Saharan African countries included in the study (Buss, 1989).

16 Due to lack of variation in the location of marriage in the early_marriage sample we restrict this analysis only to the outcome, probability of marriage between rounds. More than 99% of girls who were married before legal age of marriage were married outside the village/urban PSU. Therefore, the analysis of early marriage outside village/PSU or in the same village/PSU is not possible.

17 Even though we are less worried about the sample selection as the attrition doesn’t seem to be systematically different from the retention sample based on crime rates, we use the Heckman selection correction model to check any selection bias arising from the sample attrition (Heckman, 1981). The results (not presented in the paper) show that crime against women remains significant after correcting for the selection bias.

18 Since R²_max cannot exceed 1, therefore it implies that R²_max = min{1.3*R²_controlled, 1}. We use 1.3*R²_controlled as it is always less than 1 in our case.

19 Eve-teasing is a form of sexual harassment practised generally by a man or a group of men to annoy women. Examples include verbal abuse by making sexual comments in public places.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), UK and The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER), Helsinki, Finland.