Washington Post: Why does the United States still let
12-year-olds get married?
Michelle DeMello walked into the clerk’s office in Colorado
thinking for sure someone would save her.
She was 16 and pregnant. Her Christian community in Green Mountain
Falls was pressuring her family to marry her off to her
19-year-old boyfriend. She didn’t think she had the right to say
no to the marriage after the mess she felt she’d made. “I could be
the example of the shining whore in town, or I could be what
everybody wanted me to be at that moment and save my family a lot
of honor,” DeMello said. She assumed that the clerk would refuse
to approve the marriage. The law wouldn’t allow a minor to marry,
right?
Wrong, as DeMello, now 42, learned.
While most states set 18 as the minimum marriage age, exceptions
in every state allow children younger than 18 to marry, typically
with parental consent or judicial approval. How much younger? Laws
in 27 states do not specify an age below which a child cannot
marry.
Unchained At Last, a nonprofit I founded to help women resist or
escape forced marriage in the United States, spent the past year
collecting marriage license data from 2000 to 2010, the most
recent year for which most states were able to provide
information. We learned that in 38 states, more than 167,000
children — almost all of them girls, some as young 12 — were
married during that period, mostly to men 18 or older. Twelve
states and the District of Columbia were unable to provide
information on how many children had married there in that decade.
Based on the correlation we identified between state population
and child marriage, we estimated that the total number of children
wed in America between 2000 and 2010 was nearly 248,000.
Despite these alarming numbers, and despite the documented
consequences of early marriages, including negative effects on
health and education and an increased likelihood of domestic
violence, some state lawmakers have resisted passing legislation
to end child marriage — because they wrongly fear that such
measures might unlawfully stifle religious freedom or because they
cling to the notion that marriage is the best solution for a teen
pregnancy.
In this way, U.S. lawmakers are strongly at odds with U.S. foreign
policy. The U.S. Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls ,
released last year by the State Department, lists reducing child,
early and forced marriage as a key goal. The strategy includes
harsh words about marriage before 18, declaring it a “human rights
abuse” that “produces devastating repercussions for a girl’s life,
effectively ending her childhood” by forcing her “into adulthood
and motherhood before she is physically and mentally mature.” The
State Department pointed to the developing world, where 1 in 3
girls is married by age 18, and 1 in 9 is married by 15.
While the numbers at home are nowhere near that dire, they are
alarming. Many of the children married between 2000 and 2010 were
wed to adults significantly older than they were, the data shows.
At least 31 percent were married to a spouse age 21 or older. (The
actual number is probably higher, as some states did not provide
spousal ages.) Some children were married at an age, or with a
spousal age difference, that constitutes statutory rape under
their state’s laws. In Idaho, for example, someone 18 or older who
has sex with a child under 16 can be charged with a felony and
imprisoned for up to 25 years. Yet data from Idaho — which had the
highest rate of child marriage of the states that provided data —
shows that some 55 girls under 16 were married to men 18 or older
between 2000 and 2010.
Many of the states that provided data included categories such as
“14 and younger,” without specifying exactly how much younger some
brides and grooms were. Thus, the 12-year-olds we found in Alaska,
Louisiana and South Carolina’s data might not have been the
youngest children wed in America between 2000 and 2010. Also, the
data we collected did not account for children wed in
religious-only ceremonies or taken overseas to be married,
situations that we at Unchained often see.
Most states did not provide identifying information about the
children, but Unchained has seen child marriage in nearly every
American culture and religion, including Christian, Jewish, Muslim
and secular communities. We have seen it in families who have been
in America for generations and immigrant families from all over
the world. In my experience, parents who marry off their minor
children often are motivated by cultural or religious traditions;
a desire to control their child’s behavior or sexuality; money (a
bride price or dowry); or immigration-related reasons (for
instance, when a child sponsors a foreign spouse). And, of course,
many minors marry of their own volition — even though in most
realms of life, our laws do not allow children to make such
high-stakes adult decisions.
Parental control over her sexuality was why Sara Siddiqui, 36, was
married at 15. Her father discovered that she had a boyfriend from
a different cultural background and told her she’d be “damned
forever” if she lost her virginity outside of marriage, even
though she was still a virgin. He arranged her Islamic wedding to
a stranger, 13 years her senior, in less than one day; her civil
marriage in Nevada followed when she was 16 and six months
pregnant. “I couldn’t even drive yet when I was handed over to
this man,” said Siddiqui, who was trapped in her marriage for 10
years. “I wasn’t ready to take care of myself, and I was thrown
into taking care of a husband and being a mother.”
Minors such as Siddiqui can easily be forced into marriage or
forced to stay in a marriage. Adults being pressured in this way
have options, including access to domestic-violence shelters. But
a child who leaves home is considered a runaway; the police try to
return her to her family and could even charge our organization
criminally if we were to get involved. Most domestic-violence
shelters do not accept minors, and youth shelters typically notify
parents that their children are there. Child-protective services
are usually not a solution, either: Caseworkers point out that
preventing legal marriages is not in their mandate.
Those fleeing a forced marriage often have complex legal needs,
but for children, obtaining legal representation is extremely
difficult. Even if they can afford to pay attorney’s fees,
contracts with children, including retainer agreements, generally
can be voided by the child, making them undesirable clients to
lawyers. Further, children typically are not allowed to file legal
actions in their own names.
Regardless of whether the union was the child’s or the parents’
idea, marriage before 18 has catastrophic, lifelong effects on a
girl, undermining her health, education and economic opportunities
while increasing her risk of experiencing violence.
Women who marry at 18 or younger face a 23 percent higher risk of
heart attack, diabetes, cancer and stroke than do women who marry
between ages 19 and 25, partly because early marriage can lead to
added stress and forfeited education. Women who wed before 18 also
are at increased risk of developing various psychiatric disorders,
even when controlling for socio-demographic factors.
American girls who marry before 19 are 50 percent more likely than
their unmarried peers to drop out of high school and four times
less likely to graduate from college. A girl who marries young is
31 percentage points more likely to live in poverty when she is
older, a striking figure that appears to be unrelated to
preexisting differences in such girls. And, according to a global
study, women who marry before 18 are three times more likely to be
beaten by their spouses than women who wed at 21 or older.
Ending child marriage should be simple. Every state can pass the
legislation I’ve helped write to eliminate exceptions that allow
marriage before age 18 — or set the marriage age higher than 18,
in states where the age of majority is higher. New Jersey is the
closest state to doing this, with a bill advancing in the
legislature that would end all marriage before 18. Massachusetts
recently introduced a similar bill.
But when Virginia passed a bill last year to end child marriage,
legislators added an exception for emancipated minors as young as
16, even though the devastating effects of marriage before 18 do
not disappear when a girl is emancipated. Bills introduced last
year in New York and Maryland languished and eventually died,
though Maryland’s was just reintroduced. Other states have not
acted at all. “Some of my colleagues were stuck in an old-school
way of thinking: A girl gets pregnant, she needs to get married,”
said Maryland Del. Vanessa Atterbeary, who introduced the bill to
end child marriage in her state.
Only nine states still allow pregnancy exceptions to the marriage
age, as such exceptions have been used to cover up rape and to
force girls to marry their rapists. Consider Sherry Johnson of
Florida, who said she was raped repeatedly as a child and was
pregnant by 11, at which time her mother forced her to marry her
20-year-old rapist under Florida’s pregnancy exception in the
1970s.
Additionally, teenage mothers who marry and divorce are more
likely to experience economic deprivation and instability than
those who do not. If the father wants to co-parent, he can
establish paternity and provide insurance and other benefits to
the baby without getting married.
Legislators should remember that pregnant teenage girls are at
increased risk of forced marriage. They need more protection, not
less.
Nor does ending child marriage illegally infringe on religious
rights. The Supreme Court has upheld laws that incidentally forbid
an act required by religion, if the laws do not specifically
target religious practice. Besides, most religions tend to
describe marriage as an important union between two willing
partners. That sounds nothing like child marriage, which is often
forced and which has close to a 70 percent chance of ending in
divorce. “There was a concern that we would be offending certain
cultures within our society,” said New York Assemblywoman Amy
Paulin, who introduced an unsuccessful bill last year to end child
marriage in her state. “So instead of seeing this as an abuse of
young women, [some legislators] were seeing this as something we
needed to protect for certain cultures.”
Betsy Layman, 37, shares Paulin’s goal. Layman was 27 when she
escaped the marriage that had been arranged for her in her
Orthodox Jewish community in New York when she was 17, to a man
she had known for 45 minutes. Even after she fled with her three
children, the repercussions of her marriage continued to plague
her. She was a single mother with a high school equivalency
certificate, no work experience and no money for child care. The
temporary and part-time jobs she managed to get couldn’t cover the
bills.
“I was on Section 8, Medicaid and food stamps,” Layman said.
“There were times there just was not enough food for dinner.” When
the electric company shut off her power for nonpayment, she would
light candles around the house and tell her children there was a
blackout. Only when her youngest child reached school age was she
able to find full-time employment and gain some stability.
“Legislators have the power to prevent what happened to me from
happening to another 17-year-old girl,” Layman said. “I beg you to
end child marriage.”