In five particularly troubling cases, the child was married at age 10. The vast majority were 16 and 17, but 20 of them were under the age of 13. They point to a 2021 study found that 300,000 minors under the age of 18 were legally married in the US between 20.
Nevada, a state known for Elvis Presley impersonators officiating quickie weddings, has the highest historical rate of teenage marriages in the US, followed by Idaho, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. Others say simply that there is nothing wrong with a 16-year-old getting married, that children must grow up one day and make tough life decisions, and that many teen marriages lead to years of happiness.īut campaigners insist they're tantamount to abuse and too often tie teen girls to grown men. 'Our work will not be done until all states end child marriage completely,' Swegman said.Ĭonservatives and others have resisted introducing or raising age limits in some states - sometimes calling age limits 'arbitrary' or that they interfered with individuals' rights and religious liberty. Wyoming late last month upped its minimum age for marriage to 16, over objections from state Republicans.Ĭasey Swegman, a public policy director for the Tahirih Justice Center, an immigration non-profit, called Wyoming's shift a 'hard-fought win' but warned that it still allowed vulnerable 16-year-olds to get married. West Virginia's Republican-run Senate Judiciary Committee this week rejected in a 9-8 vote a bill that would have prohibited minors from getting married. Politicians in Vermont, California, Washington, Texas, Maine, Kansas, Connecticut, and other states have proposed bills to raise their age limits this year. State laws vary, but child marriages can require a parent's consent. Currently, only seven states ban all marriages for those aged under 18, and seven states still have no minimum age limit for tying the knot. In the US, child marriages regularly end in divorce and see the younger partner, usually a girl, drop out of school or fall into poverty.Īs recently as 2017, marriage for under 18s was legal in all 50 states.
'Even one minor being forced to marry before 18 is a tragedy,' Powell told .Ĭhild USA and the UN's agency for children, Unicef, are working to end all marriages and informal unions involving those under the age of 18. Likewise, domestic violence shelters often turn away unaccompanied children. Those fleeing a cruel spouse can be treated as runaways by police and returned to their homes, even against their will. In a country with broad religious freedoms, many insular, cult-like groups and immigrant communities with their own traditions of marrying off girls, the practice is hard to stamp out, campaigners warn.īecca Powell, the group's advocacy director, said it was 'inherently dangerous' for any youth under age 18 to wed because they lack the legal rights of an adult, which can leave them trapped in abusive unions. Though the number of child marriages has fallen this past decade, and incidents of prepubescent brides are rare nowadays - campaigners say state legislatures still have much work to do. In another shocking story of America's child brides, Sherry Johnson was raped by a deacon who she was coerced into marrying. She ended up having six children in the seven years they were together This revives horror stories of child brides, like Dawn Tyree, who at 13 was married and pregnant with a man 19 years her senior, or Sherry Johnson, who was raped as a child by a deacon who she was coerced into marrying. Once all the figures from 20 are available, researchers expect to uncover hundreds and perhaps thousands of cases, which can condemn teens to young pregnancies and abusive 'groomer' husbands. That includes 30 teens in West Virginia, 39 in Michigan and another 15 in Wyoming in 2021, according to the latest figures gathered from state sources that can take years to trickle through the system. The era of 11-year-old girls marrying much older men is in America's rearview mirror, but exclusive new data show that a worrying number of youths in their mid-teens are still getting hitched to adults.ĭ obtained figures from Unchained At Last, a non-profit that campaigns to end young marriages, showing how scores of kids - mostly girls aged 16 and 17 - have wed adults from Maine to North Dakota these past two years.
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