But but Moooslems! [TriggerWarning: Fundie xtian child-forker bashing]

[Razer]

Washington Post: Why does the United States still let 12-year-olds get
married?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/02/10/why-does-the-united-states-still-let-12-year-old-girls-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.”

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