Causes of Child Marriage and Its Effects on the Child in Jigawa State, North West Nigeria: Implications for Counselling

This research sought to find out the causes of child marriage and its effects on the child in Jigawa State, North-West Nigeria. In order to carry out this investigation, the researcher formulated two research questions and one hypothesis to guide the investigation. An instrument tagged “Causes of Child Marriage And Its Effects On The Child†(COCMAIETCQ) was constructed by the investigator to collect information from the respondents. The instrument has 21 items, 10 on the causes of child marriage and 11 on effects of child marriage. The researcher conducted a reliability test on the instrument using split – half method to get a reliability coefficient of 0.79. The researcher used the purposive sampling technique to select 270 married men and women that took part in the research. The investigator used 3 research assistants to administer 270 copies of the questionnaire on the respondents in the urban, semi – urban and rural areas of Jigawa State. The research assistants retrieved 72, 88 and 71 copies of the questionnaire from the respondents in urban, semi – urban and rural areas respectively. The researcher collated the data from the field work, used the mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions while one – way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. The investigator used 2.50 as benchmark to know if respondents agreed or disagreed with each of the 21 items of the instrument. The investigation revealed that there is child marriage due to poverty of parents with mean score of 3.18, Islamic religion allows child marriage with mean score of 2.90, and high bride price encourages child marriage with mean score of 2.65. The research equally revealed that young married girls may develop obstetric fistula due to prolonged delivery with mean score of 3.22, early marriage of girls could lead to their drop – out from school with mean score of 3.19 and child marriage violates women’s right to consensual marriage with mean score of 2.99. One of the recommendations was that the Jigawa State government should enact a law that prohibits child marriage so that women’s rights to freedom of education are not violated.