New Report Calls for End to Child Marriage in US

A new report from two human rights groups explores the legal landscape that enables child marriage to persist in the United States, and calls for action. Co-authored by Unchained At Last, a survivor-led movement to advocate for victims of forced and child marriage, and Equality Now, a worldwide human rights organization fighting to end discrimination against all women and girls, the report calls for state and federal policymakers and civil society organizations to take action, introduce legislative reform and coordinated policy, and raise awareness to put an end to this human rights abuse.

A child marriage is defined as any formal marriage or informal union in which one or both spouses are under the age of 18. According to research by Unchained at Last, between 2000 and 2021, more than 314,000 children were legally married in the United States; 86% of those married were girls, most aged 16 or 17, though some were as young as 10. While boys typically marry a spouse an average of 1.5 years older, girls marry adult men an average of four years older.

The U.S. does not legislate on child marriage at a federal level, and each state sets its own minimum age for marriage, resulting in a range of minimum ages across the country. As recently as 2018, child marriage was legal in every state in the U.S., but thanks to the advocacy and lobbying of survivors and groups like Unchained At Last, there are now 16 states, one district, and two territories where the minimum age of marriage has been raised to 18, without exception.

The “without exception” part of that sentence is key. In many states, in situations that would normally be defined as statutory rape, marriage provides an exemption from or a defense against charges. “If a child is with an older adult, and in any other circumstance that relationship or sexual relations within that relationship would be considered statutory rape, they basically issue a ‘get out of jail free’ card for that relationship, just because they're married,” explained Anastasia Law, a human rights lawyer and the program officer for North America at Equality Now. According to the Unchained At Last/Equality Now report, “At least 60,000 marriages since 2000 have occurred at an age or spousal age difference that should have constituted statutory rape under the law.”

In 1995, Fraidy Reiss was forced into a marriage by her Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. Reiss was just 19 at the time. She was finally able to flee her marriage after 12 years and later began advocating for other survivors of forced marriages, and in 2011 she founded Unchained At Last. In the course of this work, it became clear from the people reaching out to her that child marriages constituted a large portion of forced marriages in the United States. Until Reiss founded Unchained At Last in 2011, child marriages were not tracked or studied.

According to Unchained At Last, the average rate of child marriage among states with available data was 2.03 per 1,000 girls and 0.31 per 1,000 boys. Child marriage happens across the country, but is most common in the states of Nevada, which has an average rate of 6.15 per 1,000; Idaho, which has an average rate of 3.56 per 1,000; and Utah, whose average rate is 3.23 per 1,000.

According to Unchained At Last, parents almost always play a crucial role in facilitating a forced marriage. “An example of that would be, a parent decides their 16-year-old child should be married, they sign a form and give it to the county clerk’s office, and that child can now be married. There’s no permission from the child involved,” said Law. There is no minimum age of marriage in California, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, which allows minors of any age to marry with parental or judicial approval.

Loopholes in immigration laws enable American girls to be trafficked legally overseas and forced to marry adult men from foreign countries so the men can get U.S. visas. Similarly, American men are legally importing child brides from overseas. A 2019 report by the Senate Homeland Security Committee found that between 2007 and 2017, 4,749 minors obtained green cards after entering the country using spousal or fiancé visas.

The list of impacts of child marriage is long and devastating. When a girl is married before the age of 18, she faces a lifetime of damaging consequences to her health, her education, her economic opportunities, her physical safety, her sexual and reproductive rights, and her freedom from violence and sexual exploitation. “It’s almost every aspect of your life,” said Reiss, and the ramifications are long-lasting. For example, girls who are forced to marry are significantly more likely to drop out of school and never complete their education. As a result, they're more likely to live in lifelong poverty.

Law points out that to bypass legal restrictions, some child marriages are conducted through just a religious ceremony and never registered with the state. Given this, Law warns that legal reform won’t be enough to put an end to this harmful practice, and that states will also need to implement holistic and multisectoral approaches: “We need to go further than just setting the minimum age of 18. We need to implement education, awareness, safeguards, protections for minors who were already married before the minimum age was changed. We need to go beyond the law, because we know that just by setting the law at 18, people can fall through the gaps.”

As part of the 2016 United Nations Global Program to Accelerate Action to End Child Marriage, the U.S. has promised to eliminate forced and child marriage by the year 2030. There are still 34 U.S. states where child marriage is still permitted, but Equality Now and Unchained At Last are hopeful their lobbying will change that in the next five years, and child marriage will be prohibited in all 50 states.

“The reason they’re not moving quickly to do it is, in many cases, misogyny,” said Reiss. “Almost all of the minors who marry in the U.S. are girls married to adult men. If there were boys who were being pulled out of school, raped on their wedding night, raped repeatedly, having their futures robbed from them, I have a feeling legislators would be moving more quickly.”

Looking ahead, Reiss said, “Our plan at Unchained At Last is to keep pushing the United States to keep that important promise. Making a promise is not enough. Keeping that promise is crucial. And we are going to do whatever we can to shame, cajole, pressure, annoy the United States into keeping its promise. Girls deserve at least that much.”