Every three seconds, on average, a girl under the age of 18 is married somewhere in the world. In India. In Ethiopia. And, to our shame, in Illinois, Maryland, Colorado — and most of America.
Thirty-two states still allow child marriages in some circumstances, such as with the permission of a parent or a judge. Two states, New Mexico and Mississippi, have no minimum age at all.
Some of the defenders of child marriages in America are religious groups on the far right, but as a liberal myself, I find it deeply dispiriting that in a number of states they are joined by left-leaning organizations such as the local affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood — even, in Illinois, the National Organization for Women.
That’s right: Some progressives and feminists fight to defend child marriage, usually on the basis of “child rights.” I shake my head in disbelief: If you actually talk to girls and women who have been married young, what you often hear is the opposite of empowerment. Instead, it’s oppression and rape and the loss of education and childhood.
For progressive organizations to ally themselves with right-wing extremists to defend what sometimes amounts to state-sanctioned statutory rape — this is liberal self-caricature.
Thankfully, child marriage has just been banned in California, after a nine-year battle that should never have taken so long. Ten days ago Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed a bill banning all child marriage in the state, in the presence of Courtney Stodden, a model and singer who was married at 16 to a 50-year-old actor who she says was abusive; he has denied that.
Previously, there was no minimum age for marriage in California, so long as a parent and judge consented. Progressive groups, including the state affiliates of the A.C.L.U. and Planned Parenthood, had worked to block passage of a ban, but opposition melted when the issue drew more attention.
As a longtime foreign correspondent for The Times, I often saw girls in Africa or South Asia married to older men; like most people, I saw this as a human rights issue. But in 2017 I realized, to my astonishment, that the same was happening in the United States — and at that time every single state allowed children to be married.
That year I interviewed a Florida woman, Sherry Johnson, who was married at 11 to a 20-year-old man, a member of her church, who had raped her. Johnson had become pregnant, child welfare authorities were investigating, and her parents and church wanted to avoid a messy criminal case.
“I guess you’re just going to get married,” she recalled her mother telling her.
I’ve been writing about the issue since, and there has been progress. Delaware and New Jersey were the first states to ban all child marriages, in 2018, and a succession of others followed, mostly blue states. California is the 18th state to ban all child marriages.
Child marriage isn’t routine in the United States, but neither is it rare. Unchained at Last, a nonprofit that fights child marriage, pored over marriage records and calculated that some 315,000 children were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2021. A great majority were 16 or 17, but some were as young as 10. Most were girls married to adult men.
At least 66,000 of those marriages involved ages or age differences that would have constituted a sex crime in that state.
“It’s a workaround for statutory rape,” said Fraidy Reiss, the executive director of Unchained at Last.
Red states have lagged in banning child marriage, and in those states it has often been religious conservatives who defend such marriages, either because they’re giddily pro-marriage or because they fear that a pregnant girl will get an abortion if she must wait to marry the baby’s father.
“Marriage is not the problem; the abusers are the problem,” Norman Woods, the director of a conservative Christian nonprofit called Family Voice Action, told South Dakota legislators last year.
Conservatives and progressives who defend child marriage emphasize that they’re against forced marriages of any kind but think that 16- or 17-year-olds should sometimes be allowed to marry when there’s no coercion. Those on the left talk about respecting the rights of children and also worry that if underage girls are barred from marrying, they could also be blocked from getting abortions.
“Young people have the right to agency over their own lives,” a group of progressive organizations wrote this year in opposing a ban on child marriage in Colorado. “Marriage is an important right that young people may willingly decide is the best option for them in building their lives.” This is earnest and well intended, but to me it sounds as if it comes from people who haven’t spoken to children who have actually endured these early marriages.
The progressive groups that in Illinois have successfully opposed a ban on child marriage include the A.C.L.U. of Illinois, the Illinois branch of the National Organization for Women and Planned Parenthood Illinois Action. In some other states and at the national level, those organizations have been either neutral or helpful in banning child marriage.
Planned Parenthood Illinois Action should listen to the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s warning that child marriage “is one of the most persistent forms of sanctioned sexual abuse of girls and young women.”
Likewise, as the Illinois chapter of NOW defends child marriages, it is at odds with the national organization. NOW as a whole is part of a coalition trying to end all child marriage, and its website calls on states to ban child marriage on the basis that it is “extremely detrimental to the health and well-being of girls.”
A married underage girl (and it’s almost always a girl rather than a boy) is vulnerable because if things go wrong, she often won’t be accepted at shelters or be able to hire a lawyer. She can be married young but may not be able to escape the marriage until she turns 18.
“It’s some surreal alternate universe where the groups that I would think would be our biggest allies standing up for girls have somehow instead taken this outrageous position in fierce support of a human rights abuse and archaic harmful practice that destroys girls’ lives,” said Reiss, of Unchained at Last. “I don’t know how to wrap my brain around this.”
These are the states that still allow child marriages in some circumstances: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
The United States has called on other countries to end child marriage. Yes! We should continue to do so. But we don’t have the moral authority to tell other countries to ban child marriages as long as we retain this abusive practice at home — defended by impractical zealots at both ends of the American political spectrum.
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.
The post How Is Child Marriage Still Legal in the U.S.? appeared first on New York Times.
