As the United Nations launches the 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women – the world’s largest annual gathering on women’s rights – we at Unchained At Last are launching a hybrid parallel event.
Join us and Ashley Flowers of Crime Junkie as we talk with American forced and child marriage survivors about how they escaped their nightmare and why they now have partnered with us to make sure the U.S. keeps its promise – under the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals – to eliminate forced and child marriage by year 2030 and help achieve gender equality.
True Crime: Forced Marriage in the U.S.
Crime Junkie’s Ashley Flowers Explores United States’ Forced Marriage Problem
An Unchained At Last Hybrid Parallel Event
68th Session of the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women
14 March 2024
12:30 p.m. ET – 1:30 p.m. ET | 9:30 a.m. PT – 10:30 a.m. PT | 4:30 p.m. GMT – 5:30 p.m. GMT
Featuring:
Sponsored by:
IN PERSON:
Church Center for the United Nations
777 United Nations Plaza, New York City
VIRTUALLY:
Via Zoom
About Commission on the Status of Women
Each year the U.N. hosts CSW, the world’s largest annual gathering on women’s rights, in New York City. Representatives of member states, U.N. entities and approved non-governmental organizations from around the world are invited to attend. The 68th session of CSW takes place 10 to 22 March 2024, on a hybrid basis, with a priority theme of accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective.
About Unchained At Last
Unchained is a survivor-led NGO dedicated to ending forced and child marriage in the U.S. through direct services and systems change – in line with U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 5.3, which calls for the elimination of child, early and forced marriage by year 2030, since these are recognized as harmful practices that hinder gender equality. Unchained provides crucial legal and social services, always for free, to individuals in the U.S. who are escaping forced marriage and rebuilding their lives. At the same time, Unchained pushes relentlessly for social, policy and legal change. Founded in 2011, Unchained has been an Organization in Special Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council since 2017.
About Ashley Flowers
Ashley Flowers is a podcast creator and host of #1 podcast, Crime Junkie. In addition to podcasting, she’s a founder of audiochuck media company, New York Times bestselling author, and mother. Apart from hosting the hit true crime podcast Crime Junkie, she hosts several other chart-topping shows, including The Deck and The Deck Investigates. Ashley is the Founder of audiochuck, home to industry-leading, advocacy-driven podcasts that have generated over two billion downloads. In just six years, audiochuck has contributed more than $7.5 million to nonprofit organizations and continues to seek out advocacy opportunities across the globe to help solve cold cases, locate missing persons, fund DNA testing and advocate for marginalized communities. Ashley’s passion for advocacy also led her to establish Season of Justice, a nonprofit that provides financial resources to help solve cold cases.
The silence sent a loud message last Thursday, when we held our first-ever Silent Chain-In in Olympia.
More than 20 survivors, allies and legislators joined us to stand silently on the rotunda steps in the state capitol, dressed in bridal gowns and chains. Our message was clear: It is time for Washington legislators to pass HB1455 and end child marriage — a human rights abuse that impacted 5,048 children as young as 13 in Washington between 2000 and 2021, mostly girls wed to adult men, in some cases before the girls were old enough to consent to sex.
Rep. Monica Stonier, the primary sponsor of HB1455 joined us in our silence, as did legislative champions Sen. Derek Stanford – who introduced a companion bill in the senate – and Sen. Manka Dhingra – who is holding a hearing on HB1455 in the senate law and justice committee on Jan. 30. Child marriage survivors Kate Yang and Sara Tasneem and forced marriage survivor Stephanie Warren also joined to share their personal stories. We were joined, as well, by several allies from the Washington Coalition to End Child Marriage, including Michele Hanash of the AHA Foundation and several members of Zonta International, including Katherine Cleland.
Our Silent Chain-In got a lot of attention, including from the Seattle Times (which was also picked up by the Spokesman-Review, the Columbian, the Herald-Palladium and others), NewsRadio 560 KPQ, KPUG, the Northwest News Network, Fox 13 (link not available) and more.
We at Unchained started and now lead a growing national movement to end child marriage in the United States by making the marriage age 18, no exceptions, in all 50 states. One of the many ways we advocate for change is by hosting Chain-Ins like this. Read more here about this form of peaceful protest we invented.
Child marriage is an urgent problem in Washington. Dangerous legal loopholes allow parents to enter a child of ANY AGE into marriage without any input required from the child, and without any real legal recourse for a child who does not want to marry.
Marriage before 18 can too easily be forced, because minors, even a day before their 18th birthday, have limited legal rights that make resisting or escaping an unwanted marriage nearly impossible. Further, marriage before 18 is a human rights abuse that destroys American girls’ health, education and economic opportunities and greatly increases their risk of experiencing violence.
Let’s seize on the momentum. If you live in Washington, contact your senators now and urge them to end child marriage. And wherever you live, here are other ways you can get involved.
We set out in November with what felt like a pretty ambitious goal: to raise $100,000 in the last 50 days of 2023 to help end forced and child marriage in all 50 U.S. states.
Thanks to your extraordinary generosity, and a dollar-for-dollar match on the first $75,000, we raised more than DOUBLE that goal: $261,783!
Forced and child marriage don’t stand a chance — especially if you continue to partner with us. Here are some ways you can do that.
We know reading our founder/executive director Fraidy Reiss’s piece in HuffPost — in which she describes the trauma of being forced to marry, have unprotected sex and become a mother — might be painful for you.
But we ask that you read it and share it widely anyway. Because writing it was even more painful for Fraidy.
And the world needs to know about the reality of forced marriage in the United States, if we have any hope of ending it.
We have more than DOUBLED our goal of raising $100k in the last 50 days of 2023 to help end forced and child marriage in the U.S. But we can do more! Child marriage remains legal in 40 U.S. states, so we still have quite the battle ahead.
You still have a matter of hours left to donate to our 50-for-50 year-end campaign, which will help us take a stand against forced and child marriage in 2024 and beyond.
Did you know that our Chain-Ins — the unique form of protest we invented, at which we gather in bridal gowns and chains to demand an end to forced and child marriage — have garnered huge media attention? They have been featured on Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s Gutsy series on Apple TV+ and in the LA Times, Washington Post, New York Times and more.
And did you know that we have Chained-In 18 times since 2015, in eight U.S. states — seven of which went on to end child marriage? In fact, the Connecticut state senate, which had held up the child-marriage ban for weeks, finally passed it unanimously just minutes after our Chain-In, as a direct result.
And did you know our 19th Chain-In will be in Olympia, Washington, in January?
Please help us raise $100k in the last 50 days of 2023 so we can continue pushing — in bridal gowns and chains when necessary — to end forced and child marriage in all 50 U.S. states.
Once again, our research on child marriage has been published in a peer-reviewed journal — as we continue to push the United States to acknowledge and eliminate its child marriage problem.
Our article in Child Abuse & Neglect, co-authored with Prof. Alissa Koski and Kaya Van Roost of McGill University, shows that child marriage remains legal and happening at an alarming rate in most of the U.S. Like in other countries, child marriage here reflects a devaluation of girls.
Please help us raise $100k by the end of 2023 to help end child marriage in all 50 U.S. states. Because we know you agree with us that girls matter.
As Unchained’s facility dog and chief cuddle officer, I have found — to my chagrin — that it takes more than short walks and long naps to support survivors of forced marriage.
For instance, did you know court filing fees for a survivor to seek a divorce can cost $250? Or that a week’s worth of groceries (including, I hope, liverwurst) for a survivor who has fled a forced marriage can cost $50?
So I am begging you: Please help us raise $100k in the last 50 days of 2023, so we can continue supporting survivors in 50 U.S. states.
Every dollar you give, up to $75,000, will be matched by a generous donor — and by a belly rub for me. Note that I deserve a LOT of belly rubs.
This year, with you as our partner, we helped to end child marriage in three U.S. states — Vermont, Connecticut and Michigan — the first time we won that many legislative victories in one year.
That means we are now 10 down, 40 to go, as we continue to lead the national movement to end child marriage in the U.S. We have come through for the 7.5 million girls who live in those 10 states, but tens of millions more girls are waiting for us.
We already are gearing up for multiple legislative battles in 2024. In fact, we plan to stage a Chain-In protest in Olympia in January, in bridal gowns and chains, to convince Washington legislators that girls matter.
Please help us raise $100k in the last 50 days of 2023, so we can win this important battle for girls in all 50 U.S. states.
A generous donor will match every dollar you give, up to $75,000.
NOTE: Due to inclement weather, this Chain-In will instead be a “Silent Chain-In” inside the rotunda of the Legislative Building instead of on the outside steps.
Child marriage is an urgent problem in Washington. Dangerous legal loopholes allow parents to enter a child of ANY AGE into marriage without any input required from the child, and without any real legal recourse for a child who does not want to marry.
Some 5,048 minors as young as 13 were entered into marriage in Washington between 2000 and 2021. More than 80% were girls wed to adult men, and between 38 and 51 marriages occurred with a spousal age difference that met the definition of a sex crime.
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.”
This calls for a protest.
We will Chain-In in Olympia on January 18. We will wear bridal gowns and chains to urge legislators to pass SB5695/HB1455, the simple, commonsense bill that would end child marriage in Washington.
Speakers include:
We also will sing and chant against forced and child marriage, including a rendition of The Girls You Have Destroyed, a chilling poem/song we wrote about child marriage in the United States.
Chain-In Olympia
January 18 | 12:00 p.m.
North Steps of the Washington State Capitol
416 Sid Snyder Ave. SW, Olympia, WA 98504
Child Marriage in the United States
We at Unchained started and now lead a growing national movement to end child marriage in the United States by making the marriage age 18, no exceptions, in all 50 states.
Marriage before 18 can too easily be forced, because minors, even a day before their 18th birthday, have limited legal rights that make resisting or escaping an unwanted marriage nearly impossible. Further, marriage before 18 is a human rights abuse that destroys American girls’ health, education and economic opportunities and greatly increases their risk of experiencing violence.
Join the movement. Chain-In with us to demand an end to this human rights abuse.
