What happened to banning child marriage?

 Banning child marriage does not require us to be disrespectful of faiths or customs; it requires us to decide that a child is not someone the law should hand to a spouse.

From Hartini Zainudin

In 2018, the government committed to ending child marriage and began work towards legislation to that effect. Since then, the government has changed hands more than once. With each transition, this commitment has been quietly deprioritised, drowned out by other agendas, never formally abandoned but never acted upon.

What followed was the National Strategy Plan in Handling the Causes of Child Marriage, a five-year programme launched in January 2020 involving 61 agencies, 17 strategies, and 58 programmes. That plan expired in 2025. No public progress report has been tabled. No government since has answered for it.

The numbers are sometimes offered as reassurance. Registered child marriages have declined, from 1,467 in 2019 to 923 in 2023. We are told this is progress. But 923 children married in a single year is not a trend to celebrate. It is a crisis that continues. And those are only the registered cases.

In the whole of Malaysia, only two states have raised the minimum marriage age to 18 in law: Selangor in 2018, and Kedah in 2022. Even then, both retain exceptions allowing shariah judges to approve marriages below 18, meaning the floor is not actually firm.

The remaining states fall into three categories, none of them acceptable.

Penang, Sabah, Johor, Melaka, Perak, and the federal territories, including Kuala Lumpur, agreed years ago to amend their laws. They have not done so. There has been no explanation and no timeline. A promise made and quietly abandoned is still a broken promise.

Pahang, Terengganu, Perlis, Negeri Sembilan, and Kelantan have refused outright. They have offered no credible justification for why the children in their states deserve less protection than children elsewhere. When a 14-year-old in Kelantan was married to a 40-year-old man, I filed a police report against him, here, in Petaling Jaya. No one from the Kelantan authorities ever called me. Only the police at the Petaling Jaya police station questioned me.

Sarawak is a category of its own and, in some ways, the most instructive. It has the highest number of child marriages in Malaysia. Yet in February 2026, the state government proposed standardising the minimum marriage age at 18 across all three of its legal frameworks: civil, shariah, and customary law. Community consultations are underway. The Bidayuh community has already agreed. Other groups are still in discussion. No law has passed yet but the work is being done, respectfully and seriously.

Sarawak shows what genuine engagement looks like. It also shows that cultural sensitivity and child protection are not in conflict. They can be pursued together, with patience and political will. The question for every other state is: why aren’t you doing the same?

This is not a federal-state jurisdictional impasse. It is a political choice, repeated across state after state, year after year. The federal government has watched it happen and decided not to compel action. That, too, is a choice.

The flawed excuse

The most common objection to a ban is that it disrespects Islamic law, customary traditions, and state rights. This argument conflates very different things.

A ban on child marriage does not ban religious ceremonies. It does not prohibit courtship, betrothal, or community traditions. It does not erase culture. It simply says: the state will not legally recognise a marriage where one party is a child. The ceremony can take place. The legal protections of marriage, which flow from registration, not ritual, will wait until both parties are adults.

Countries with far more complex religious and indigenous legal landscapes than Malaysia have managed this. Colombia banned child marriage in 2024 while introducing specific provisions to support indigenous communities affected by existing unions. Sierra Leone and Belize eliminated all exceptions without abandoning their cultures. They decided their children were worth protecting within them.

The sweetheart clause, the concern that two young people in love should be allowed to marry, is also a separate matter, and one that can be addressed through thoughtful policy rather than through leaving all children unprotected. Two teenagers who love each other can still love each other at 18. What they cannot easily do, if married young, is undo the health consequences of early pregnancy, recover years of lost schooling, or leave a marriage that turns abusive when they lack the legal standing to do so.

A ban and respect for culture are not in conflict. They are separate questions. We must stop treating them as the same.

Our ask

Parliament has just resumed sitting. We call on the federal government to:

• Table immediately the progress report on the National Strategy Plan in Handling the Causes of Child Marriage (2020–2025), and make it available in full to Parliament, civil society, and the public.
• Commit to federal legislation setting 18 as the minimum age of marriage for all Malaysians, accompanied by a policy framework that meaningfully addresses cultural, religious, and customary concerns through proper engagement, not by leaving children unprotected.
• Require all states to align their laws, with a clear timeline and accountability mechanism. The inconsistency between states is not a feature of our system. It is a failure of it.
• Answer the question Malaysia deserves an answer to: what happened to the commitment to end child marriage, and when will this government act?

Banning child marriage does not require us to be disrespectful of faiths or customs. It requires us to decide that a child is not someone the law should hand to a spouse.

We have decided this for non-Muslim children already. Non-Muslims cannot be legally married below 18. It is time we decided the same for every child in this country, regardless of religion, regardless of state, regardless of how long this promise has been deferred. - FMT

Hartini Zainudin is co-founder of Yayasan Chow Kit, Founder of Kasih Madhya, and Co-Founder of Voice of the Children.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.