Once again we are doing a wild victory dance: Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek just signed the bill we helped to write, introduce and promote to ban all marriage before age 18, no exceptions. !!!
Yes, this is our third legislative victory this year. And yes, we are now 15 states, one district and two territories down as we continue to lead the national movement to end a human rights abuse that destroys girls’ lives. What a victory for the more than 10.3 million girls who live in those states/district/territories.
Alongside our allies in the Oregon Coalition to End Child Marriage that we convened, as well as legislative champions like Sens. Janeen Sollman and David Brock Smith, we met one-on-one with almost every member of Oregon legislature. We testified at legislative hearings and submitted memos of support, and we recruited our allies to do the same. We compiled in-depth legal research conducted on a pro bono basis by the law firms White & Case and DLA Piper. We launched email campaigns to target state legislators and the governor.
And it worked!
You made this victory possible, too, if you took action on our email campaigns, shared our posts on social media or supported us financially.
Prior to passing this new legislation to ban child marriage, dangerous legal loopholes allowed a parent to enter a 17-year-old into marriage in Oregon with nothing more than “written consent,” without any input required from the child, and without any real legal recourse for a child who does not want to marry. And the marriage-age laws undermined sex-crime laws, becoming a “get out of jail free” card for would-be child rapists.
Our research found that some 3,604 minors were entered into marriage in Oregon between 2000 and 2021— and some 83% of those were girls wed to adult men. At least 1,272 and possibly as many as 1,814 marriages between 2000 and 2014 occurred with a spousal age difference that would have met the definition of a sex crime outside of marriage.
Furthermore, child marriage creates a nightmarish legal trap that destroys nearly every aspect of an American girl’s life. There’s a reason the U.S. State Department has called marriage before 18 a “human rights abuse.”
Oregon has now joined 14 states (Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, New Hampshire and Maine), two territories (American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands) and Washington, D.C. in embracing the simple, commonsense legislative solution we are pushing in all 50 U.S. states to ban child marriage, without exceptions. Such legislation harms no one, costs nothing and ends a human rights abuse.
Only 35 states and three territories — and 27 million girls — to go. And we are still waiting for Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe to sign the bill we convinced the Missouri legislature to pass. Child marriage does not stand a chance.
The Oregon Coalition to End Child Marriage includes:
