California lawmakers are refusing to end child marriage. And you can help change their minds.
We at Unchained helped to write and promote SB 273 to end all marriage before 18 in California, without exceptions. But legislators amended the bill beyond recognition; in its current form, it would do more harm than good.
Take action! Email California legislators here to urge them to kill SB 273 and introduce legislation to end all child marriage. It only takes a minute.
Child Marriage in California
The marriage age in California is 18, but the law includes a dangerous loophole: Children of any age may marry with parental “consent” and judicial approval.
However, children can easily be forced to marry before they turn 18 and become legal adults, because they face overwhelming legal and practical barriers if they try to leave home, enter a domestic-violence shelter, retain an attorney or bring a legal action. Parental “consent” does not mitigate that danger: When a child is forced to marry, the perpetrators are almost always the parents.
Further, child marriage devastates girls’ lives. It destroys their health, education and economic opportunities, and increases their risk of experiencing violence. In fact, the U.S. State Department has called marriage before 18 a “human rights abuse.”
The current version of SB 273 would continue to allow a child of any age to marry, and would erect meaningless barriers that are insufficient to protect children from forced marriage or from the harms of early marriage.
In addition, the current version of SB 273 would continue to undermine statutory-rape laws and give rapists a “get out of jail free” card. The age of consent to have sex in California is 18, and someone who has sex with a child under 18 can be charged with a felony or misdemeanor, depending on the parties’ age difference. However, those protections disappear as soon as a marriage license is issued, because the statutory-rape law exempts married couples.
A full rebuttal of the current version of SB 273 is here, in the form of the opposition letter we submitted to the California legislature on August 9.
Earlier this year, we got Delaware and New Jersey to end all child marriage – the first two U.S. states to do so. Other states are moving to do the same. Why is California lagging behind?