Brigitte Combs was 11 years old and living in Los Angeles when her mother found a prospective husband for her.
The mother and father were in the Hare Krishna movement, and she says that as a result, she was never allowed to attend school, was extremely sheltered and was supposed to marry young. The man was 26 years old and a Krishna devotee, and everything was set for a marriage.
Because California allows children of any age to marry, as long as at least one parent and a judge approve, this seemed plausible.
Other countries have banned child marriage, including Sierra Leone last year and Colombia this year, but here in America the practice remains legal in 34 states. Even as the U.S. government advises other countries to end a cruel practice, at home we preserve what amounts to legally sanctioned statutory rape.
Opposition to banning child marriage in America comes from both religious conservatives (but what if she’s pregnant?) and from liberal groups like the California branches of Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union (child rights!).
Combs was all set for the wedding. But at the last minute, the man backed out, concerned about taking on an 11-year-old bride.
She then had a bit of a reprieve as the family moved to Texas. But her mom found a new suitor when she was 13 and announced, “This is a good time for you to be betrothed.”
So it was that at 14, Combs was married in a religious ceremony to a 37-year-old man. Soon she became pregnant.
Her husband was not violent, and at first she was not wholly against the marriage. Her parents were strict and had never taken her to a restaurant, while her husband won her heart by taking her out for a strawberry milkshake. She also now had a stepson almost her age, which at first seemed fun.
Married life soon curdled, however, leaving her feeling trapped with no freedom or future. “I was already thinking about how to get out of this.”
Combs said that when she was seven months pregnant, right after she turned 15, her mother and husband took her to the county courthouse to make the marriage legal. She remembers the judge showing her a look of concern and asking a question along the lines of, “Do you want to do this?” or “You’re both willing?”
“I wanted to cry, and I wanted to say: ‘No, no, I don’t. Do something! Do something!’” Combs recalled. “I was just wishing she’d grab me and hug me and take me somewhere.”
But she couldn’t imagine defying her parents and husband, and she was about to have a baby. And so to the judge’s question, she simply said, “Yes.”
I’ve examined the marriage certificate, and it shows that the judge was Becky Sierra. The certificate lists the ages and birth dates of bride and groom, so there was no uncertainty about the age gap. I called Sierra, and she didn’t remember the case. But she told me that she felt she was obliged to marry a minor when a parent signed the forms. “I probably overstepped just by asking” if there was consent, Sierra said, adding that she had never heard of a judge who did not go ahead with a marriage.
At least Sierra showed concern. I once wrote about a Florida woman, Sherry Johnson, who was compelled by her parents to be married at the age of 11 to her rapist; at the first courthouse the group went to, in Tampa, a clerk refused to marry a girl so young, so the party went to nearby Pinellas County, where officials unquestioningly approved, as documented in the marriage certificate.
Combs had her baby, and her husband moved them to a farm run by Hare Krishna followers, where Combs felt unsafe and “life was hell,” as she recalled. She was too young to drive, but she got a lift to town and stopped in lawyers’ offices to ask about getting a divorce. No one would help a child; they told her to work through her parents.
“So I went to the women’s shelter,” Combs remembered. But the shelter couldn’t help minors.
She explored joining the Army, but then she became pregnant for a second time.
Eventually, Combs simply ran away from her husband, leaving her two children behind, and became homeless, living under a tree. She worked for a while as a nude dancer and then was recruited for prostitution, which she declined. If a marriage doesn’t work out for a child, there aren’t easy escape routes.
In the end, Combs was assisted by a man who helped her get a divorce and became her second husband; that didn’t last, either. Now age 56, she is happily married to a third husband, and she long ago recovered her children.
She said she always carried the trauma of that first poisonous marriage but didn’t have a vocabulary to process it. And then in 2018 she read that Delaware had become the first state in America to ban all child marriage — and she broke down and wept. Now she had a framework to understand what she had endured. When she heard last year that Virginia, the state in which she now lives, was debating a similar law, she rushed to the legislature and testified. The law passed.
After Delaware led the way by banning all child marriages, with no exceptions, Washington, D.C., and 15 more states followed: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.
In some states that allow child marriages, including Nevada and Florida, the minimum age is 17. In a great many others, the minimum age is 16. In Hawaii and Kansas, it is 15. And California, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma set no minimum age at all, with the consent of a parent, a judge or both.
How frequent are child marriages? The best evidence comes from a nonprofit called Unchained at Last, which obtained marriage license data from around the country and found that between 2000 and 2021, more than 314,000 people under the age of 18 were married in the United States.
Some 86 percent were girls, typically marrying men an average of four years older than themselves. Most of the minors were 16 or 17 years old, but some were as young as 10.
Some 66,000 of those marriages would risk prosecution for statutory rape if it were not for the gloss of a marriage license. Unchained at Last says that marriage represents “a ‘get out of jail free’ card for a would-be child rapist.” (In some states, the contradictions are unresolved: the marriage is permitted, but sex between husband and wife when one is a minor remains a criminal offense that is simply not prosecuted.)
The number of children being married seems to have declined sharply since 2000. But as of 2021, four or five children were still being married on average each day in the United States, according to the examination of marriage license data by Unchained at Last.
Much resistance to banning child marriage comes from conservatives. Some want to defer to parents or to conservative religious communities that are eager to marry girls before they entangle themselves with boys. Others worry that if a pregnant girl cannot marry, she will get an abortion — although the Catholic Conference in several states strongly backed the ban on early marriages.
When liberals oppose the ban, their arguments are different. Opposition in California has come from the state chapters of the A.C.L.U. and Planned Parenthood. Elsewhere, those organizations have often been allies or neutral in the effort to end child marriages, but the California branches have defended minors’ “right” to marry.
“We are concerned that such a ban could drive young people who are already in abusive relationships further underground, out of the reach of social services,” the organizations wrote in a joint letter last year opposing a ban.
“Second, we are concerned about the consequences for those young people who willingly enter a marriage, such as young parents who want to further solidify their family relationship and have already taken on adult responsibilities.”
To me, this position veers into liberal self-caricature and underscores how well-meaning people can be out of touch with those they aim to protect. Spend time with girls who have actually been married young and you don’t find plucky teenagers “who want to further solidify their family” — you find scared girls pushed into marriages that, researchers have found, disproportionately end in divorce.
“Especially during these dark times, when we need Planned Parenthood more than ever to fight for women and girls, it is mind-boggling and devastating to see Planned Parenthood of California instead fighting to preserve a human rights abuse that’s destroying girls’ lives,” said Fraidy Reiss, founder and executive director of Unchained at Last, which has helped lead the fight to ban child marriages. “It feels like a slap in the face and a stab in the back at the same time.”
Reiss, who says that she herself was forced as a teenager into a marriage in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, deals regularly with underage girls caught in unhappy or violent marriages, and she emphasizes the practical challenges such girls face. In some states, underage girls who flee an abusive spouse are legally runaways and breaking the law. Domestic violence shelters mostly don’t take minors. Minors often can’t initiate legal proceedings, such as seeking a protective order or a divorce. Reiss also sees how often early marriages traumatize the young spouses for decades.
“You can’t un-rape a girl,” she said.
Americans understand this when the context is other countries. In 2010, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to enact the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act, which labeled “all cases of child marriage as child abuse” (the measure died in the House). But somehow we’re less cleareyed at home — or even when granting visas to foreigners.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved spousal and fiancé visas for more than 8,000 foreigners in marriages involving a minor between 2007 and 2017, a Senate investigation found. The investigation found a 13-year-old girl who was forced to marry an older cousin in Pakistan, for example, and a visa for him was then approved so he could come to America. Conversely, an American male pedophile can traffic a foreign teenage girl to the United States by getting her a visa as his fiancée or wife.
“Child marriage is a workaround for statutory rape laws and trafficking laws,” Reiss said.
When Missouri banned all child marriage this year, one of those lobbying for the move was Sheena Renea, whose life journey is, as she puts it, a “worst-case scenario” for such a marriage.
Renea grew up in a troubled household, enduring sexual abuse and addiction; she went into her first drug rehab program at age 12. At 15 she married a 20-year-old, hoping to find safe harbor; instead, she says, her husband regularly beat her and even threatened to kill her.
“I wasn’t old enough to get a restraining order; I wasn’t old enough to go into a domestic violence shelter,” she recalled. “I also wasn’t old enough to get a lawyer.”
With her mother’s help she eventually was able to get a divorce, but her ex-husband continued to threaten her. So when she was 17, drunk and high with friends, she idly mentioned that they could go kill her ex-husband. And so they did, and although she didn’t pull the trigger, she was charged with first-degree murder.
“I wasn’t old enough to get out of marriage,” she said. “But I was old enough in the state of Missouri to face the death penalty.” She served 25 years in prison before being released in 2017, and she makes no excuses.
“A man lost his life,” she said. “I lost my life in prison. We left an array of victims behind us.”
Renea now runs a small nonprofit, Show Me Justice for All, that advocates prison reform and an end to child marriage. She said that all that tragedy could have been prevented if she had been forced to wait to marry.
“If the love is true, why would it hurt to wait for a year or two?” she asked. “When a grown man dates a teenager, society calls it statutory rape, but when that same man marries her, suddenly it’s called matrimony,” Renea added. “A ring does not make it right.”
Source photographs by Heritage Images and Sjoberg Bildbyra/Getty Images.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Nicholas Kristof became a columnist for The Times Opinion desk in 2001 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His new memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.” @NickKristof
The post Why Do We Allow Child Marriage in America? appeared first on New York Times.
