A/HRC/41/19 that approximately one in five women who are refugees or otherwise displaced by conflict experience sexual violence.8 9. Girls are 2.5 times more likely than boys to be out of school in conflict situations, and nearly 90 per cent more likely to be out of secondary school than their counterparts in non-conflict countries (A/72/218, para. 49). Studies indicate that, for security reasons, girls are the first to be pulled out of school, limiting their access to education. Limited education, coupled with increased confinement at home, leads to the perception that the girls in the family will become a financial burden and that marriage could provide them with protection and financial stability.9 10. High levels of displacement have led to an increase in child, early and forced marriage, both in conflict contexts and in countries of destination of refugee populations. For instance, the rate of child, early and forced marriage among Syrian refugee girls in Jordan rose to 32 per cent in 2014, compared with an average of 13 per cent in the Syrian Arabic Republic before the war. It was revealed that, in the majority of cases documented by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic during the war between March 2011 and December 2017, girls aged between 12 and 16 years and some adults, including widows, were victims of child, early and forced marriage (A/HRC/37/CRP.3). In its submission, Soutien Belge OverSeas reported that cultural beliefs regarding the need to protect girls’ virginity for the honour of the family have led Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon to use marriage as a way to avoid the influence of less conservative cultures in the host community. Girls Not Brides noted in its submission that, in Chad, child marriage is the most commonly reported form of violence among young Sudanese and Central African refugee girls. 11. The breakdown of societal structures often coincides with the takeover of legal institutions by armed actors or violent extremist groups. Such groups have at times perceived women and girls as either a tool or a threat to their ideology and enforced social order. In some cases, girls and women have been forced to marry members of these groups to serve as sex slaves. For example, from 2014 onwards, Yazidi girls and women were forced to marry members of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) (A/HRC/32/CRP.2 and A/HRC/37/CRP.3, para. 83). ISIL in the Syrian Arab Republic, Boko Haram in Nigeria and Cameroon and the Islamist armed group Al-Shabaab in Somalia have abducted girls and women to be raped, sold and forced into marriage.10 Similar instances of harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage, have been reported in the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali and Somalia.11 In other contexts, such as in Malaysia and Nigeria, armed and organized crime groups have used child and forced marriage as a cover for human trafficking and other forms of child sexual exploitation.12 Furthermore, during the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s and in the midst of the activities of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo throughout the 1990s and 2000s, fighters frequently abducted girls as so-called bush wives for the purpose of sexual exploitation and slavery. During the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, thousands of women were forced into marriage as part of the regime’s aim to create a labour force through doubling the population.13 Similarly, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic documented numerous accounts of ISIL fighters forcing families to marry off their girls, as unmarried women and girls over the age of puberty were perceived by ISIL as a threat to its ideology and enforced 8 9 10 11 12 13 4 Ibid. UNICEF and others, “Child marriage in humanitarian settings: spotlight on the situation in the Arab region”, 2018. Girls Not Brides, “Child marriage in humanitarian settings”, p. 2. See A/HRC/39/72, para. 58; S/2018/250; A/HRC/37/CRP.3; A/HRC/32/CRP.2; and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and Norwegian Refugee Council, “Nigeria: multiple displacement crises overshadowed by Boko Haram”, 9 December 2014. Girls Not Brides, “Child marriage in humanitarian settings”, p. 3. Theresa de Langis and others, “Like Ghost Changes Body”: A Study on the Impact of Forced Marriage under the Khmer Rouge Regime (Phnom Penh, Transcultural Psychosocial Organization of Cambodia, 2014).