Mexican senators propose raising minimum marriage age to prevent child abuse

: Federal Soldier lawmakers desire to raise the lower limit age for matrimony to 18 for both sexual activities to maintain children from dropping out of school, according to a measure introduced in Mexico's Senate on Thursday.

The current lower limit age of 14 for women and 16 for work force promotes children "to travel forth school and go to work, causing a state of affairs that makes a barbarous circle of poverty," five senators who sponsored the measure said in its text.

Nearly 400,000 Mexican children between 12 and 17 are married or life with romanticist partners, said Sen. Guillermo Tamborrel, a member of the opinion National Action Party who wrote the bill.

Most of those matrimonies take topographic point after an underage adult female goes pregnant, Tamborrel said, because work force in many parts of United Mexican States can avoid jailhouse clip for statutory colza by marrying the girl.

In indigenous communities, parents also still sometimes set up matrimonies for their immature girls for economical and cultural reasons, Tamborrel said. Today in Americas

"When a matrimony is forced, the possibility of developing as a individual is limited or eliminated for many," he said. "They are in a very vulnerable position."

If approved, the bill, which suggests unspecified pregnancy-prevention programmes for children and teenagers, would function only as a guideline, as states will still be left to pass their ain matrimony rules.

The United Nations Children's Fund have urged authorities to put 18 as the legal matrimony age.

UNICEF have establish that even parents who understand the negative impact of very immature matrimonies happen it hard to defy economical and societal pressures.