“It is considered normal for a girl to drop out of school, to not go out of the house to meet her friends, to not play, to get married early, to have children and to not question any of this,” saidNeelam, 15, a member of a collective of adolescent girls formed by CREA and Mahila Mandal in Jharkhand, India.Neelam gives a voice to the day-to-day reality of about 700 million women around the world — approximately 10 percent of the world’s population — married before their 18th birthday. Of these, approximately 250 million were married before the age of 15. If the present trends continue over the next decade, 150 million more girls will be married before they are 18.

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