We’ve been busy here at Unchained At Last: So far this year, 12 U.S. states have introduced legislation to end all marriage before 18, without exceptions: Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Texas.
We and our allies have been hard at work advocating for these bills — and pushing back against harmful bills pending in Maryland, Mississippi and Utah.
We helped to write some of the strong bills, and already this year we have testified virtually at five legislative hearings and arranged for dozens of our allies to do the same. We’ve hosted Instagram Live conversations with legislators and coordinated virtual advocacy days so we and our allies can “meet” directly with lawmakers. We have launched email campaigns in 12 states. We lead and constantly expand national and state coalitions. We continue to update our detailed analysis of the dangers in each state’s marriage-age laws — based largely on pro bono legal research conducted by the law firms White & Case and DLA Piper.
To date, our tireless advocacy has helped lead four U.S. states and two territories to end child marriage, and we won’t stop until we get all 50 states. You can track our progress here.
Will you join us? See how you can help end child marriage in the U.S.
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As the United Nations launches the (virtual) 65th session of the Commission on the Status of Women — the world’s largest annual gathering on women’s rights — we are launching a parallel event.
Forced and child marriage are human rights abuses that remain legal in most of the United States, impacting mostly women and girls. These abuses often mean a lifetime of rape, abuse and domestic servitude, and the loss of reproductive and financial rights.
Let’s hear directly from three U.S. forced marriage survivors whose stories are chronicled in the award-winning, feature-length documentary film Knots (including our founder/executive director Fraidy Reiss). We’ll watch the film together, then Mabel van Oranje of Girls Not Brides will moderate a discussion with the three survivors and the film producer about how eradicating forced and child marriage is necessary to achieve gender equality.
Moderator:
Speakers:
Sponsors:
About Knots
Knots: A Forced Marriage Story, written and directed by Kate Ryan Brewer, is a feature-length documentary film that examines the truth about forced marriage in the U.S. through the complicated experiences of three survivors, including our founder/executive director, Fraidy Reiss.
This film includes discussion of rape and other forms of violence that may not be suitable for children.
About Unchained At Last
Unchained At Last is the only organization dedicated to ending forced and child marriage in the United States through direct services and advocacy.
Unchained provides crucial legal and social services, always for free, to help women, girls and others in the U.S. to escape arranged/forced marriages. At the same time, Unchained pushes for social, policy and legal change; the organization started and now leads a growing national movement to eliminate child marriage in every U.S. state and at the federal level.
Unchained is an Organization in Special Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council since 2017.
You helped us to achieve our goal. Five. Times. Over.
We set out in mid-November to raise $10,000 by the end of 2020 so we can continue fighting forced and child marriage in the U.S. through direct services and advocacy.
And you responded by helping us to raise more than $50,000.
Your generosity shows you believe not only in our mission but also in our ability to achieve that mission. We promise not to let you down.
It’s almost time to bid 2020 good riddance! What better way to kick this year to the curb and make sure it never comes back than to help support our work in 2021 providing crucial, often life-saving services to forced marriage survivors like Mariam?
2020 hasn’t been all bad, though: We helped to end child marriage in two U.S. states and one U.S. territory this year, and we helped some 135 survivors escape forced marriages and rebuild their lives. We now serve approximately 65 survivors at any given time.
Happy New Year, and thank you for your continued support. Here’s to a happier, healthier, saner 2021.
We set out in November to raise $10,000 by year’s end to allow us to keep providing crucial, often life-saving services to forced marriage survivors like Mariam in 2021. Thanks to your generosity, we have already raised $23,266 — including more than $7,000 online — far surpassing our initial goal.
Let’s keep going! Can you help us get to $30,000 by the end of 2020 so we can continue to help even more forced marriage survivors and continue to lead the growing national movement to end child marriage in every U.S. state?
This Giving Tuesday, let’s give to those who are escaping forced and child marriages in the U.S. during a pandemic.
Meet Mariam.*
Mariam* was 16 when her parents informed her she was going to marry her much older cousin.
She cried and pleaded but was powerless to stop them. Laws in much of the U.S. allow parents to marry off their children but often deny those children the right to leave home, enter a shelter or even file for divorce. Few laws and policies exist to punish or prevent the forced marriage of adults too.
So Mariam turned to us. We are the only organization dedicated to helping women, girls, LGBTQ individuals and others like Mariam to escape forced marriages — while also pushing relentlessly for social, policy and legal change to end forced and child marriage in the U.S.
“I had hope for myself and future knowing that [Unchained] would fight for me … and that I was not alone,” says Mariam.
We helped Mariam achieve safety; she is currently a college graduate with a promising future. Now we ask you to help us bring the same hope and safety to others.
YOU CAN SAVE LIVES LIKE MARIAM’S.
Due to the pandemic, we are receiving more requests for help from survivors in more desperate situations than ever before. And due to our 2020 legislative victories ending child marriage in two more states — Pennsylvania and Minnesota — more state legislators than ever want to take action.
But the financial crisis has sidelined many of our longtime funders, and the pandemic precludes us from hosting fundraising events to meet the increased need.
You can help. With your support, we can continue in 2021 to provide crucial, often live-saving services to survivors like Mariam, and we can continue to lead the growing national movement to end child marriage in every U.S. state.
Unchained At Last is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and all donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
Journalist Elizabeth Vargas interviewed Fraidy about forced and child marriage in the United States, while four American child marriage survivors shared their heartbreaking stories — all for a two-hour A&E documentary special now airing on Hulu titled “I Was A Child Bride: The Untold Story.” Stream the special here.
Raising awareness through media interviews is just one of the strategies we at Unchained use as we lead a growing national movement to end forced and child marriage in the U.S. through direct services and advocacy.
Child marriage, or marriage before 18, was legal in all 50 U.S. states as of 2017. Thanks to our relentless advocacy, that is changing. Delaware and New Jersey in 2018 became the first two states to end this human rights abuse, followed by American Samoa in 2018, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Pennsylvania and Minnesota in 2020, Rhode Island and New York in 2021 and Massachusetts in 2022.
However, child marriage remains legal in 43 states and is happening in the U.S. at an alarming rate: Our groundbreaking research revealed that nearly 300,000 children as young as 10 were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018 – mostly girls wed to adult men. Read more about child marriage in the U.S. and our work to end it.
We spent a gorgeous, cool September evening at the drive-in to watch the award-winning documentary film Knots: A Forced Marriage Story and raise money to help end the human rights abuses examined in the film: forced and child marriage in the U.S. And we did it all from the pandemic-proof safety of our cars.
Thanks to the generous support of our donors and sponsors — DLA Piper, Columbia Bank and the Unchained At Last Board of Directors — we raised nearly $9,000 to continue helping women, girls and others flee marriages they did not choose.
Jen Kiaba doesn’t need to say a word to describe the trauma of her forced marriage to a stranger and her courageous escape from it. She explains it perfectly, in gut-wrenching detail, through photography.
Now, as part of an ongoing, yearlong collaboration with Jen, we at Unchained are sharing on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram the powerful photos from her Burdens of White Dress portfolio to illustrate the horror of forced marriage in the U.S.
Jen grew up in the infamous Unification Church cult, where she was forced at age 20 to marry a man the cult leader chose for her at random during a mass “matching ceremony.” When she finally managed to escape from the marriage and the cult, she said, it was with a “proverbial scarlet A branded into my chest.”
Jen went on to earn a degree in art history from Bard College. Today she is an artist and educator whose work has won a third-place Julia Margaret Cameron Award and an Honorable Mention in the 13th Pollux Award and was a top-200 finalist in Critical Mass.
She has no regrets about her imaginary scarlet A. “It is my battle scar from a fight I am proud to have survived,” Jen said, “because I fought my way into this new world.”
