Although the body of evidence on how to prevent child marriage is growing, its rate did not decline at a desirable pace. Previous interventions targeted many of the root causes of child marriage. However, despite wide recognition of the need to change pro-child marriage social norms, attempt to study the impact of social norms change in addressing child marriage was rarely investigated or not investigated well. Lack of understanding of social norms and how to change them effectively impedes development of effective and sustainable child marriage prevention programs. Moreover, for most of the interventions, there were no rigorous evaluations. Furthermore, the interventions that had strong evaluation designs did not necessarily focus on social norms change. It is against this background that the current research employs a cluster randomized controlled trial (CRCT) to evaluate Tipping Point (TP), an integrated social norms intervention designed by CARE to address child marriage in Bangladesh. This report presents findings from the baseline survey. The report focuses on assessing the rates of child marriage in TP study areas and decision making ability of the adolescent girls.
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