This column was originally published by Insider. Read the original article on Business Insider.
We have a double dose of good news!
The New York senate just approved S3086, sponsored by Sen. Julia Salazar, to end child marriage. And, at nearly the same time, the Rhode Island senate UNANIMOUSLY approved S398, sponsored by Sen. John Burke, to do the same.
Both bills still need approval in the lower house — but New York and Rhode Island are now one step closer to becoming the fifth and sixth U.S. states to end all marriage before 18, without exceptions.
The next step should come soon: In Rhode Island, the house judiciary committee will vote tomorrow on H5387, sponsored by Rep. Julie Casimiro. In New York, A3891, sponsored by Asm. Phil Ramos, is awaiting a vote in the assembly judiciary committee.
If you live in Rhode Island or New York, make sure your legislators know you want them to vote YES on ending child marriage.
Mark your calendar: You are invited to join us June 17 for a virtual discussion — moderated by Chelsea Clinton — of our new study of the extent of child marriage in the U.S.
We found that nearly 300,000 children, a few as young as 10, married recently in the U.S. — mostly girls wed to adult men. Some 60,000 marriages occurred at an age or with a spousal age difference that should have been considered a sex crime.
United States’ Child Marriage Problem
June 17, 2021 | 3pm ET/12pm PT
Online
Details are coming soon.
The United States has a child marriage problem – but a simple solution is available.
Nearly 300,000 children — a few as young as 10 — were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018.
These findings confirm the importance of the growing national movement we lead to eliminate child marriage in every U.S. state and at the federal level.
Fraidy Reiss, Opinion Contributor Apr 11, 2021, 10:02 AM
Demonstrators, including the author of this piece, wearing bridal gowns and veils protest at the Massachusetts State House to urge legislators to end Massachusetts child marriage on March 27, 2019. David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
OPINION
Great news for child rapists: You don’t need to be a congressman or beloved film director to get away with your crimes. You just need a marriage license — and that is not too difficult to obtain.
Nearly 300,000 children, defined as under 18 years of age, were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2018, according to a new study by Unchained At Last — the nonprofit I founded to end forced and child marriage in the US — and McGill University. A few of the children were as young as 10. Most were girls wed to adult men, typically before the girls were old enough to legally file for divorce.
Some 60,000 marriages since 2000 occurred at an age, or with a spousal age difference, that should have constituted a sex crime under the relevant state’s laws. In about 12% of those cases, the marriage was legal under state law, but sex within the marriage was still a crime. With each of those marriage licenses, the state sent a child home to be raped.
In the other 88% of those cases, state law specifically granted a marriage exception for what would otherwise have been considered statutory rape. In essence, each of those marriage licenses became a “get out of jail free” card for a would-be rapist.
“Why is it legal to rape a 16-year-old if you’re married?” asked Chloe Rockwell, 21.
Rockwell was 16 when the 22-year-old man she had met online convinced her to marry him so he would not be prosecuted as her pregnant belly became obvious. In Idaho, where they lived, sex with a 16-year-old is punishable by up to life in prison if the perpetrator is three or more years older than the minor — unless they are married to each other.
“He literally googled how to get away with statutory rape, and it said you can’t be charged if the underage girl is your wife,” Rockwell said.
The federal criminal code, too, prohibits sex with a child age 12 to 15, but specifically exempts those who first marry the child.
Since child marriage remains legal in 46 US states, with some states setting no minimum age for marriage, the legal code essentially creates an open invitation to predators. The four US states that have ended marriage before age 18 — Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota — did so only in the last three years. Bills to end child marriage are pending in another 12 states, but some have stalled.
While most states set 18 as the marriage age, legal loopholes in 46 states still allow minors to marry, typically with nothing more than a parent’s signature on a form (parental “consent” that, in Unchained’s experience, is often actually parental “coercion”) and/or a judge’s rubber stamp. Five states’ laws still include an archaic pregnancy loophole, which seems designed to cover up rape and force girls to marry their rapist.
“This didn’t happen to me in a far-off country,” said Patricia Abatemarco, 55, who was 14 and pregnant when her parents married her off to the 28-year-old Bible study counselor who had been raping her for two years. “I was raised in an upper-middle-class, suburban home in Minnesota.”
Federal law also does not specify a minimum age to petition for a foreign spouse or fiancé, or to be the beneficiary of a spousal or fiancé visa. A kindergartner must wait until she is 21 to petition for her parents to come to the US, but she can legally petition, during naptime, for her 80-year-old husband to get a visa and, in most states, permission to rape her without fear of prosecution.
This is essentially an invitation to traffic girls under the guise of marriage. The US approved 8,868 spousal or fiancé visas involving a minor between 2007 and 2017, according to the US Senate Homeland Security Committee. The younger party was a girl in 95% of the cases.
Most of the children who married recently in the US were girls married to adult men an average of four years older, and sometimes much older, Unchained’s new study found. Nearly all the minors were age 16 or 17, the ages at which they are least likely to get sympathy from legislators, even though their limited legal rights create a nightmarish legal trap and a serious power imbalance between the minor and their adult spouse.
Even “mature” 16- or 17-year-olds are still not legal adults, and therefore can easily be forced to marry or to stay in an unwanted marriage. They can be forced into a marriage with little or no input from them, typically by a parent or a judge, before they are legally allowed to leave home. Those who do try to leave, to escape an impending forced marriage or abusive spouse, often have nowhere to go, since Unchained has found that most domestic violence shelters turn away unaccompanied minors.
Minors typically are not even allowed to file for divorce on their own, since they cannot independently bring a legal action. And Unchained has found that divorce attorneys often are reluctant to take them on as clients, since contracts with minors, including retainer agreements, usually are voidable.
When teens reach out to Unchained to beg for help escaping a forced marriage and learn of their limited options, many end up attempting suicide. Death seems like the only way out for them.
Marriage before age 18, including at ages 16 or 17, is a “human rights abuse” according to the US State Department. It devastates American girls’ education, economic opportunities, and health. It puts women at significantly increased risk of experiencing domestic violence. And child marriage almost always ends in divorce.
Both Abatemarco and Rockwell suffered abuse during their marriage, and both are now divorced. Both women saw their education interrupted. Rockwell was thrust into poverty; Abatemarco struggled with alcoholism and still struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Ending child marriage requires simple, commonsense legislation that Unchained and its allies have been advocating since 2015 that harms no one — except child rapists — and costs nothing. We need to demand that lawmakers in 46 states and at the federal level pass legislation to ban child marriage now.
“I’m relatively intact, but the scars will always be there,” Abatemarco said. “If we can make that not happen for a girl, then let’s do that.”
Fraidy Reiss is a forced marriage survivor and the founder/executive director of Unchained At Last, a nonprofit that combats forced and child marriage in the US through direct services and advocacy.
We’re hiring! As we continue to grow, we are seeking a Director of Client Services who will guide women, girls, LGBTQ individuals and others as they escape forced marriages.
Please apply if you:
More than 150 people joined us today via Zoom for our parallel event to the United Nations’ (virtual) 65th session of the Commission on the Status of Women.
We watched the award-winning, feature-length documentary film Knots, which follows three U.S. forced and child marriage survivors — including our Fraidy Reiss. And then Mabel van Oranje, founder of Girls Not Brides, led a discussion with the film’s stars and producer/director about how eradicating forced and child marriage is necessary to achieve gender equality.
“It takes a village to end forced and child marriage in the United States,” Fraidy said. “Please be a part of that village.”
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: Fraidy Reiss, Sara Tasneem and Nina Van Harn. The film shows how forced and child marriage are human rights abuses that remain legal in most of the U.S., 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.
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.
Did you register yet for our parallel event to the virtual United Nations Commission on the Status of Women March 16 at 1:30 p.m. ET?
So far more than 100 people have signed up to join us as we watch the award-winning documentary Knots about forced and child marriage in the U.S., followed by a discussion with the film’s producer and stars (including our Fraidy Reiss) moderated by Mabel van Oranje.
If you’ve already registered, visit the NGO CSW virtual platform, click on “Schedule,” select “My Agenda,” and make sure “Forced Marriage in the U.S.: A Screening of Knots & Discussion With Its Stars” is there. If it’s not, follow these instructions to make sure you’re able to find our event on March 16.
See you then!
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.
REGISTRATION REQUIRED – INSTRUCTIONS HERE
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.
