does it matter? legal age up to 18 for muslims in SG to get married?

The government plans to raise the minimum age for Muslim marriages from 16 to 18 years later this year. This will bring it in line with the minimum age for marriages under The Women's Charter. The Minister-in-Charge of Muslim Affairs, said the move will signal the resolve of the Muslim community to tackle the divorce rates in the community.

He was responding to the MP for Marine Parade GRC, who brought up the issue in Parliament on Wednesday. Pointing out that the number of teenage divorces in the Malay-Muslim community is still significant despite various efforts, she said multiple factors were involved.
Among them were single parent families, disrupted families, multiple partners or spouses, teenage pregnancies and births. She also highlighted that Malay teenagers made up 55.1% of all teenage deliveries in 2006. He agreed that marriages involving minors are twice as likely to result in divorce during the first ten years of marriage compared to marriages involving adult persons. This could be because their young age and lower educational levels do not give them a stable start to married life. In fact, divorces involving minors - where either the husband or the wife, or both were minors at the point of marriage - make up 30% of all Muslim divorces each year.
He said intensified efforts to help minor couples as well as their parents make informed decisions about marrying young have included pre-marital counselling courses at two centres run by the Association of Muslim Professionals (AMP) and the PPIS-Jurong Family Service Centre. As a result, among the 443 couples who attended pre-marital counselling last year, 141 couples, or one in three, dropped their plans to get married early.

Now honestly, is it really of a much difference 16 to 18 years old? could a 23 year be affected by early marriage syndrome? i dono .......................ZzzzzZZZzzzzZZZZzzzzzzZZZzzzz