For example, I’m also sure that these societies have much lower divorce rates than our current scheme. That doesn’t mean we should lower the ages simply because it lowers the rate, but there are some different cultural norms at play. What we’d need to do (and maybe I can find the time to do it) is cross references the countries marriage age with the amount of violence against women.

For example, the article you linked to talked about violence against women in South Africa– but if you check the wikipedia entry I linked to you’ll see that it is the same for maritagable age as most of the USA - 18, and 16 with parental approval. That would tend to refute your causality. Sudan, the lowest of the group, does have a lot of violence, but it’s violence directed at everyone though there’s a high degree of violence toward women (conscription, forced prostitution, etc.). How this is effected by the mariagable age, I’m not sure.

So, it’s not as simple as to say that cultures that do not value their women and have more female violence have lower marriagable ages. In order to be fair, we’d have to first define a set of countries/states that we believe treat women fairly, and compare their marriagable ages to those that do not. I think that the problem you will find is evidenced by my chart above– even in America you can marry someone at 14 and even in Africa/Asia (which has the highest violence against women) you’ll find that they’re 18/16.

So, statistically, there’s no reason to imply this causation.

I’m totally with you in physical development. I’m suspicious of our food sources as to younger puberty ages and wonder if our girls and boys are becoming fertile way before the appropriate time.

I also expect that marriages between older males and younger females is more prevalent in other cultures do to the same mortality rate you hint at.

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Has it occurred to you that the reason things are different in our current society is to prevent some very serious abuses that have happened in the past, or to allow people to reach a certain level of physical and mental maturity before being married.

13, 14 and 15 year old girls tend to have more complications in childbirth, and in less developed countries with less medical intervention, tend to die more frequently.

It is not for convoluted reasons that the marriage age is higher than in the past.

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Throughout the world it seems that the youngest you can get married is puberty– in Sudan. South Africa goes as low as 12 for females.

These are countries which also have much more violence directed towards women.

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