When a family can receive money for marrying off a daughter, they have one fewer mouth to feed and more resources to help everyone else. When a family has to pay to marry off a daughter, the younger the girl, the less her family pays in dowry. In both cases, the incentives strongly favor early marriage. And every year a girl doesn’t marry, there’s a greater chance that she will be sexually assaulted—and then considered unclean and unfit for marriage. So it’s also with the girl’s honor and the family’s honor in mind that parents often marry their girls young, so they can avoid that trauma.
