"To protect her honour": Child marriage in emergencies – the fatal confusion between protecting girls and sexual violence

The Gender and Protection in Humanitarian Contexts: Critical Issues Series is designed for humanitarian workers, policy-makers and donors to: (1) highlight promising practices and/or gaps in programming; and (2) critically analyse work in the field of gender and protection in humanitarian contexts. This paper examines the issue of child and early forced marriage (referred to as child marriage throughout this paper) in the Syrian context, and what can be learnt from CARE's experiences.