RECONSTRUCTING PREVENTIVE LEGAL PARADIGMS: SADDU AL-ZARI’AH AND THE LIMITS OF STATUTORY REFORM IN CHILD MARRIAGE REGULATION

Child marriage persists despite statutory reforms raising the minimum legal marriage age, indicating structural limits of regulatory approaches relying solely on formal prohibition. Situated within the Indonesian legal context following the enactment of Law No. 16 of 2019, this study examines why legal reform fails to substantially reduce child marriage and how a preventive legal paradigm can be reconstructed from the Islamic jurisprudential doctrine of saddu al-zari’ah. Using a qualitative socio-legal method based on empirical fieldwork, the study combines interview data with legal and doctrinal analysis. The findings show that statutory reform often displaces rather than eliminates the practice, as communities adapt through procedural mechanisms such as dispensations and informal marriages. This demonstrates that the primary limitation of legal reform lies not only in enforcement but also in the absence of a preventive legal paradigm. The study reconstructs saddu al-zari’ah as a conceptual framework for preventive governance and formulates a three-layer intervention model consisting of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. This reconstruction transforms a classical jurisprudential doctrine into an applied regulatory paradigm capable of addressing socially embedded legal practices.