We got Trevor Noah. We’re talking about an evening of hilarity, followed by champagne and dessert.
And all proceeds from this Sept. 7 event in New Jersey will help women and girls in the U.S. to escape forced marriages. Doing good has never been this much fun …
Ticket quantities are limited, so reserve yours now.
Trevor Noah @ NJPAC
New Jersey Performing Arts Center
1 Center Street in Newark, New Jersey
Friday, September 7, 2018
6 p.m. Registration
7 p.m. Trevor Noah performance
9 p.m. Champagne & dessert reception
This event honors two of Unchained’s pro bono attorneys, who have helped save the lives of women and girls fleeing forced marriages in the U.S.:
Noah was already the most successful comedian in Africa when he was introduced to U.S. audiences in 2014, as the successor to host Jon Stewart on Comedy Central’s Daily Show. Since then, Noah has become one of the world’s brightest comic masterminds, thanks in part to his Comedy Central special, Trevor Noah: Lost in Translation. In that show as well as his current material, Noah brings a unique global perspective to American culture and politics, with results that are as thoughtful as they are riotously funny.
You can still make yourself smile by donating now to help end forced and child marriage in America.
No, you’re not imagining it. You have been seeing Unchained At Last everywhere you look.
One of the tactics we at Unchained use, as we lead the growing national movement to end child marriage in America, is educating the public through news media. And we’ve seen some major successes recently on that front, in television, radio, print and online outlets.
Did you catch our video op-ed on NowThis? Our live interview on CBSN? Our video on Condé Nast’s Iris? Our op-ed article in The Hill? Those were some of our favorites.
We hope to see you soon at:
Looking for an internship or know someone who is? We’re seeking advocacy, direct-service and MSW interns for the summer and fall. Learn more and apply here.
Marriage before 18 is legal in all 50 U.S. states; laws in 24 states do not specify any minimum age for marriage. Our groundbreaking research showed that an estimated quarter-million children, at least as young as 12, were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010.
Children can easily be forced into marriage or forced to stay in a marriage before they turn 18, 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 in their own name. The girls who reach out to us for help often end up trying to kill themselves when they learn of their limited options. Further, marriage before 18 destroys girls’ lives, devastating their health, education and economic opportunities and increasing their risk of being beaten by their spouse.
Our advocacy work is making an impact. In just the last few weeks, legislators in Louisiana and Delaware introduced strong legislation to end all child marriage, without exceptions. The bills we helped to write to end all child marriage in New Jersey and Pennsylvania continue to gain support. Legislation to limit child marriage is pending in many other states, and recently passed in a few.
But so far no state has ended all child marriage. In state after state, legislators have defeated, ignored or watered down the bills we’ve helped to write and promote to eliminate the loopholes that allow marriage before 18.
Here‘s what you can do to help change that.
Why have legislators abandoned 17-year-old girls? In an op-ed article published today by The Hill, Unchained’s Fraidy Reiss demands answers from lawmakers who have turned their backs on the girls at highest risk of forced child marriage.
“Marriage at 18 is a right,” Reiss explains. “Marriage at ‘nearly 18’ is a human-rights abuse that traps girls and destroys their lives. Why can’t legislators see the difference?”
Read the full op-ed here.
Kilpatrick Townsend’s Women’s Initiative and Unchained At Last invite you to a Spring fashion pop-up fundraising reception to support Unchained and a collection of entrepreneurial women vendors who have agreed to donate 15% of all sales made during the Pop-up event to Unchained.
Unchained’s founder and executive director, Fraidy Reiss, will kick off the event with a few words about our work to help women leave or avoid forced/arranged marriages, and our efforts to promote social, policy and legal change to end forced and child marriage in America.
Date: April 5, 2018
Time: 5:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Location: Kilpatrick Townsend’s Office
The Grace Building
1114 Avenue of the Americas, 21st Floor
New York, NY 10036
Light food and beverages will be served.
We encourage you to invite friends, family, and colleagues to support this great cause. Register here.
Vendors:
Alder New York
Alder New York is a skincare & haircare line founded by Nina Zilka and David J. Krause designed to leave you feeling your best. We make uncomplicated, effective products that work for you no matter who you are, made from dermatologist approved ingredients & herbalist beloved plant extracts. Because you need clean products that work for you.
Autumn Adeigbo
Autumn Adeigbo designs colorful & conversational women’s wear, sprinkled with African culture while investing in women cross-culturally along our supply and distribution chains.
The collection is sewn in New York City in female-owned production facilities, hand-beaded by women of the Maasai tribe in Kenya, and sold via a community of entrepreneurial women.
All garments produced already have a buyer, reducing both fabric waste & unsold inventory waste. Our brand’s mission is based on ethical & eco fashion, female partnership, and collaboration.
Beth’s Baubles, Bangles, and Beads
Beth has been an active jeweler and artist for as long as she can remember, following in the footsteps of her mother, Edythe. While Edythe focused on modern and pop art, making found art and neon light sculptures, prints, and paintings, Beth’s special love has been working with metals, gems, and fabrics and strings to design and make jewelry. Beth began selling her jewelry at age 10 in a local stationery store in Wilmington, Delaware and eventually expanded her entrepreneurial endeavors to be selling her creations in 22 Saks Fifth Avenue and many smaller specialty stores nationwide.
Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton is an international law firm with 20 offices and some 600 attorneys that is particularly well known for its intellectual-property practice. The firm, which has won numerous awards for community service, has shown exceptional generosity to Unchained: A team of Kilpatrick Townsend attorneys recently represented an Unchained client pro bono through her divorce proceeding, as she fled an arranged marriage.
The Kilpatrick Townsend Women’s Initiative is focused on driving the growth of the firm’s business, building the firm’s talent pipeline and assuring the inclusion of women at the firm. Unchained is deeply grateful to the Kilpatrick Townsend Women’s Initiative for hosting this fundraising event to benefit Unchained.
Unchained’s founder and executive director, Fraidy Reiss, is one of three women who shared their traumatic experiences with forced and child marriage in this video for Condé Nast’s Iris.
Fraidy, Naila and Sara were all forced by their families into marriages as teenagers. And they all later escaped.
“It’s your own family that forced you into the marriage and then that family that wouldn’t let you leave,” Reiss said. “And it’s so hard to understand why.”
Watch the full video here.
Were you one of the some 175 guests who joined us at Unchained At Last on Monday for our United Nations parallel event? We had a lively conversation about Ending Child Marriage in the U.S. and Globally: Progress, Pitfalls and the Place of News Media.
“We need to let our legislators know we are no longer putting up with this,” our founder and executive director, Fraidy Reiss, declared. “It’s time to end child marriage.”
You can watch the entire conversation on NowThis Her’s Facebook page.
The event coincided with the first day of the 62nd session of the Commission on the Status of Women at the U.N. It was our first U.N. parallel event since we were granted special consultative status with the U.N. Economic and Social Council.
The event’s speakers included:
And the event’s respondents included:
Marriage before 18 is legal in all 50 U.S. states. Most states set 18 as the minimum age, but laws in every state allow exceptions for those younger than 18 to marry. Laws in 24 states do not specify any minimum marriage age.
We lead a growing national movement to end child marriage in every U.S. state. We’re promoting strong legislation to end child marriage that is pending in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Vermont and trying to strengthen legislation to limit child marriage that is pending in Arizona, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire and Tennessee. Just last week Florida passed a bill we helped to write and promote, but not before legislators amended it to limit, rather than end, child marriage.
So far, no state has passed a bill to end all marriage before 18, without exceptions.
Let’s work together to end child marriage in America:
Whatever U.S. state you live in, child marriage is legal in your state.
That was one of the shocking facts Unchained’s founder and executive director, Fraidy Reiss, explained in a video op-ed about child marriage in America that NowThis aired today.
“Let’s be very clear,” Reiss said. “Marriage before 18 has devastating lifelong consequences. It does not bring benefit; it destroys girls’ lives.”
Watch the full video op-ed here.
A recent UNICEF report shows the global rate of child marriage has dropped — but we cannot become complacent, Unchained’s Fraidy Reiss told CBSN today in a live interview. Child marriage remains legal, and still happening at an alarming rate, across the U.S., Reiss pointed out.
Watch the full segment here.
Sherry Johnson was raped when she was 9, gave birth when she was 10 and was forced to marry her rapist when she was 11. Sherry was married right here, in the US.
Nearly 250,000 children were wed in the US between 2000 and 2010, as Renate van der Zee explained in an article for The Guardian. “Almost all were girls married to adult men,” our executive director, Fraidy Reiss, told van der Zee.
Both houses of the Florida legislature should pass a bill to set the minimum age of marriage at 18, with no exceptions, the Florida Coalition to End Child Marriage said today. The coalition, which consists of 13 organizations including Unchained At Last, as well as survivors of child and forced marriage, called on legislators in the Florida House of Representatives to remove a harmful amendment from a pending law to ban child marriage.
On January 31, 2018, the Florida Senate unanimously passed SB 140, which sets the age of marriage at 18 with no exceptions. On February 1, an identical bill, HB335, was reviewed in the House Judiciary Committee. This committee amended the bill to permit the marriage of a pregnant 16- or 17-year-old, with parental consent and limiting the age difference of the spouses to two years. The members of the Florida Coalition to End Child Marriage are calling on all House members to instead pass the original version of the bill, setting the age of marriage at 18 without exceptions.
“I don’t want a single other child in Florida to go through what I did,” said Sherry Johnson, a member of the coalition who has been campaigning for several years to change the law. Johnson was forced to marry at age 11, in Pinellas County, under the current law, to a man who had raped her repeatedly and fathered her child when she was 10 years old. “I believe this is the year that we will end child marriage in Florida. The Senate has already passed a bill that would protect all children, and I am asking the House to do the same.”
A 16 or 17-year-old is still a child, without the rights of an adult and an adult’s ability to withstand pressure to marry against their will. Pregnancy does not change that. In addition, limiting the age gap between a married child and her spouse does nothing to prevent most of the harm associated with child marriage.
A growing body of research demonstrates that child marriage is associated with, and in some cases causes, severe harm to married children, wherever they live. A 2010 study found that girls or young women in the US who married before the age of 19 were 50 percent more likely to drop out of high school than their unmarried counterparts, and only 25 percent as likely to complete college.
Girls who marry as early teens–before age 16–in the US are 31 percent more likely to end up in poverty later in life. Girls who marry while pregnant are more likely to have a second child soon after, compared with girls who become parents but do not marry. A closely spaced second birth is associated with lower economic and educational attainment.
From 2000 to 2015, over 16,400 children below age 18 married in Florida. Eighty percent of these children were underage girls who married adult men. Child marriages are often forced or coerced by parents. Florida law currently permits children to marry at age 16 or 17 with permission from their parents, and allows a child of any age to marry in the event of pregnancy if a judge authorizes the marriage.
Globally, one out of every four girls marries before age 18, and 15 million girls marry before age 18 each year. The rate of child marriage is dropping, but population increases mean the numbers are increasing. Child marriage occurs in every region of the world. The overwhelming majority of married children are girls, most of whom marry older men sometimes much older.
Researchers have found significant associations between child marriage and mental and physical health disorders. One study found that marrying as a teenager in the US was associated with a 23 percent higher risk of disease onset—including both physical and mental health conditions–for women. Research from other countries shows a correlation between child marriage and domestic violence. Married girls often find it more difficult than married women to escape an abusive or unhappy marriage and to access services such as shelter and legal assistance.
The Senate bill was sponsored by Senator Lizbeth Benacquisto. The House bill is sponsored by Representative Jeanette Nunez.
New York, Texas and Virginia have all passed laws in recent years aimed at reducing child marriage. Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden are among numerous other countries taking similar steps. Florida has been a leader in protecting the rights of children; if the Senate bill becomes law, it would make Florida the first state to completely ban child marriage.
The Florida Coalition to End Child Marriage includes the following organizations: AHA Foundation, Children’s Campaign, Delores Barr Weaver Policy Center, Florida Chapter of American Academy of Pediatrics, Florida International University Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, Human Rights Watch, Jewish Women’s Foundation of the Greater Palm Beaches, Minority Outreach Solutions, National Organization for Women, Sherry Johnson, Southern Strategy Group, Surly Feminists for the Revolution, Unchained At Last, and Zonta Club of Pinellas County.
“I am so grateful to every member of the Florida legislature who has taken the time to hear my story and care about this issue,” Johnson said. “I want to thank every senator who voted for the bill, and all the members of the House who have voted for it in committee. We are so close to getting this done, and I just want to ask, from the bottom of my heart, for legislators to go the whole way and end all child marriage in Florida.”
For more information, contact Fraidy Reiss: fraidy@unchainedatlast.org or (908) 481-4673.
