Child Marriage in Cambodia: What UNICEF's New Report Really Shows

Editorial team
1 day ago
6 min read

In Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri, two northeastern provinces where indigenous communities remain the majority, one in two teenage girls still consider it “normal” for a girl to marry before turning 18. A study published in March 2026 by UNICEF Cambodia and the Behavioural Insights Team dissects, village by village, the intimate drivers of a practice that Cambodian authorities are working to roll back.

A teenage girl sitting at the entrance of her home, in a northeastern province of Cambodia. | Photo credit: UNICEF

The report will not make international headlines. Yet it sheds rare and precise light on a phenomenon that the Cambodian government and its international partners are working hard to understand in order to address it more effectively. Published in March 2026 under the title Addressing Child, Early and Forced Marriage (CEFM) in Cambodia, the joint report by UNICEF Cambodia and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), conducted with Gender and Development for Cambodia (GADC), draws on fieldwork carried out between July and October 2025 in Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri provinces. Nearly 650 people — adolescent girls and boys, parents, village leaders and health officials — were interviewed through surveys, individual interviews and focus group discussions, conducted in Bunong, Kreung and Khmer.

The goal is not to produce another national statistic, but to understand, in detail, why early marriage persists even though the legal age of marriage in Cambodia is set at 18 (16 with parental consent).

A geography of stark contrasts

Northeastern Cambodia has long recorded the country's highest rates of child marriage. The report confirms this territorial divide, but also reveals striking nuances between the two provinces studied. In Ratanakiri, respondents estimate on average that roughly one in two girls marries before 18 — a perception markedly higher than in Mondulkiri, where the figure drops to around 4 in 10. Even more telling: in Ratanakiri, nearly half of residents consider the practice socially acceptable, compared with barely 16% in Mondulkiri, where child marriage is largely viewed as unacceptable.

These local gaps echo national trends. A joint 2024 study by Plan International and the Ministry of Women's Affairs across nine provinces had already found that 14.4% of girls married before 18, rising to 37.3% in Ratanakiri — by far the most affected province in the country. Nationally, the overall rate fell from around 25% in 2000 to 18% in 2022: a real decline that the government now intends to accelerate through a national action plan currently being finalized.

School: the first line of defense, and the first point of failure

The report highlights a central mechanism: it is often not marriage that pushes girls out of school, but the reverse. Nearly a quarter of the adolescents surveyed had dropped out of the education system, with most dropouts occurring at the primary level, between grades 1 and 6. Once schooling ends — most often at the difficult transition from primary to secondary school, when the nearest secondary school can be hours away on foot or across a river — marriage emerges as a “logical” option in the absence of a clear alternative.

The reasons for dropping out are sharply gendered. Boys leave school mainly to support their families financially, while girls often consider their education “complete” at whatever level they stop — a reflection of gender norms in which a girl's future is defined primarily by the household. The report also points to a striking gap: while 31% of all respondents cite marriage or early pregnancy as a cause of girls' school dropout, only 9% of girls who actually left school themselves confirm it as their personal reason — suggesting that outside social pressure attributes a bigger role to marriage than it actually plays in girls' lived experience.

Another finding worth noting: more than half of respondents are still unaware of existing support schemes to keep children in school (scholarships, food assistance, transport support), even though these are already in place through local authorities. The report identifies this as an area for improvement, particularly in Ratanakiri, where better outreach on these programs could make a real difference.

Shame, a quiet driver of forced marriage

While poverty remains a structural factor — financially struggling families are more likely to pull daughters out of school to work or marry — the report highlights an equally powerful force: the preservation of family honor. In both provinces, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy or even a suspected romantic relationship is often enough to trigger a hasty marriage, as parents seek above all to avoid community judgment. A local official quoted in the report sums up the prevailing logic: families fear their children being judged by neighbors, creating pressure to marry quickly rather than face the shame.

This dynamic explains a striking paradox uncovered by the survey: in Mondulkiri, where early marriage is generally seen as less acceptable, stigma around teenage pregnancy is actually stronger than in Ratanakiri. Marriage then becomes the only socially tolerated way out of an “out-of-norm” pregnancy — evidence that a decline in support for child marriage is not, on its own, enough to protect adolescent girls if early pregnancy remains heavily stigmatized.

Sexual and reproductive education: room to grow

The report identifies room for progress in access to sexual and reproductive health information: around a third of adolescents surveyed say they have never received any information on the subject, and fewer than half of girls can name a method of contraception. Schools remain the main source of information — but, paradoxically, they are not seen as the most trustworthy: health centers enjoy the highest level of trust, even though they reach only a minority of adolescents.

The report also identifies a pattern it calls “confident error” in Mondulkiri, where many adolescent girls state incorrect information about HIV transmission or condom effectiveness with confidence — compared with a greater willingness to admit uncertainty in Ratanakiri. This points to a gap in the reliability of information as much as its quantity.

Gender norms still evolving

Another section of the report examines norms around intimate-partner violence, an issue Cambodia has made a priority for awareness campaigns in recent years. In both provinces studied, a significant share of adolescents — close to seven in ten in Ratanakiri, somewhat fewer in Mondulkiri — believe a husband may be justified in hitting his wife in certain circumstances presented by researchers (neglecting the children, going out without permission, refusing sex...). Boys endorse these justifications somewhat more often than girls. This finding, specific to the rural, indigenous areas studied, contrasts with broader national demographic and health surveys, which show a declining trend in support for intimate-partner violence among young Cambodians overall — a sign that awareness campaigns are having an effect, even as more groundwork remains in the most remote areas.

What the report doesn't cover — and why

The study does not address forced marriage within LGBTQ communities, a distinct issue regularly documented by organizations such as Rainbow Community Kampuchea, whose 2019 survey found that a majority of lesbian, bisexual and transgender respondents had experienced family violence linked to rejection of their orientation, with some pushed into forced heterosexual marriage. The UNICEF-BIT report, by contrast, focuses exclusively on heterosexual early marriage in rural, indigenous settings — a methodological choice that leaves open the equally well-documented question of forced marriages imposed on LGBTQ individuals to “correct” their orientation or gender identity.

Practical recommendations, not slogans

The report lays out seven concrete recommendations: strengthening financial support to keep girls in school; updating sexuality education with a stronger focus on practical negotiation skills; expanding information channels beyond the classroom, notably via mobile phones, now owned by more than half of surveyed adolescents; and tailoring strategies to provincial differences — targeting parents in Mondulkiri, where their authority is paramount, and strengthening girls' agency in Ratanakiri, where confidence to refuse a marriage remains low despite a nominally more favorable environment.

These findings will feed into a forthcoming national action plan to prevent child marriage and adolescent pregnancy, currently being developed by the Ministry of Women's Affairs with support from UNICEF, Plan International and UNFPA, covering the 2025-2030 period.