More than two of every 1,000 U.S. girls aged 15 to 17 were wed each year between 2000 and 2021.
That was among the shocking findings of our latest study of the extent of child marriage in the U.S. Our other findings include:
- Child marriage is widespread: Some 315,000 minors, some as young as age 10, were legally entered into marriage in the U.S. between 2000 and 2021.
- Girls are most vulnerable: Nearly all the minors married were girls wed to adult men an average of more than four years their senior.
- Child marriage often means child rape: At least 20% of the marriages occurred at an age or with a spousal age difference that should have been considered a sex crime.
- Covid apparently made an impact: The number of minors wed decreased every year after 2001 until 2021, during the pandemic, when it increased by 3.8%.
This research is crucial: No central repository in the U.S. tracked ages at marriage, and no one knew how often child marriage was happening — until we started doing these studies.
Now that we have these (upsetting) data, we are better armed to continue our relentless push to ban child marriage, a human rights abuse that destroys girls’ lives, in every U.S. state.
Read our full report
