Recent global estimates of violence against women compiled by WHO show that 1 in 4 young women who have been in a relationship will already have experienced IPV by the time they reach their mid-twenties.

In this work, we estimated the associations between age at first marriage and recent intimate partner violence (IPV) among women young women aged 20–24 years using data from demographic and health surveys (DHS) conducted at 48 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We fitted a multilevel logistic regression model controlling for sociodemographic covariates.

Our pooled analyses revealed that age at marriage is strongly associated with past year IPV in a non-linear way, with steep reductions in violence when young women marry after age 15 and a continued decline in IPV for every year marriage is delayed up to age 24. The risk of physical IPV was 3.3 times higher among girls married at age 15 (24.4%, 95% CI 19.7; 29.2%) compared to young women married at age 24 (7.5%, 95% CI 5.8; 9.2%). For sexual IPV, girls married at 15 had 2.2 times higher risk compared to those married at 24 (7.5%, 95% CI 5.6; 9.5% vs. 3.4%, 95% CI 2.7; 4.2%, respectively). For psychological IPV, the relative risk was 3.4 for the same comparison (married at 15: 20.1%, 95% CI 14.6; married at 24: 25.5% vs. 6.0%, 95% CI 3.4; 8.6%).

Country specific analyses showed that, age at marriage was negatively associated with physical and psychological IPV in nearly half of the countries (n/48) and with sexual IPV in ten countries.

Our findings underscore the importance of integrating violence prevention and response interventions into efforts to prevent child marriage, as well as the health, education and social services young women access.

You can access the full paper at: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health