Jenn was 16 when her parents forced her to marry her 44-year-old rapist and abuser. When she tried to leave, she lost everything — including custody of her children.
Jenn now partners with us, publicly sharing her painful story to convince legislators and others across the U.S. to ban child marriage.
“I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, no matter how hard,” Jenn said.
Child marriage remains legal in most of the U.S. and continues to happen at an alarming rate — mostly to girls who are married to adult men. With your support and partnerships with survivors like Jenn, we have helped to ban child marriage in 10 U.S. states so far. Only 40 states to go!
Please help us raise $100k in the last 50 days of 2023, so we can continue leading the national movement to end forced and child marriage in all 50 U.S. states.
A generous donor will match every dollar you give, up to $75,000.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee took our recommendation and pressed the United States to do what we have been asking it to do: Ban child marriage.
Last month, we told you about the joint submission we co-wrote to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, together with Equality Now and others, calling out the United States for failing to end child marriage.
And the Committee listened. It said that it was “concerned” that marriage under the age of 18 is legal in 40 U.S. states, and it urged the U.S. to prohibit child marriage in all U.S. states. You can find the Committee’s concluding observations here.
Child marriage remains legal in most of the U.S. and continues to happen at an alarming rate – mostly to girls who are married to adult men. We have helped to ban child marriage in 10 U.S. states so far. Only 40 states to go!
Please help us raise $100k in the last 50 days of 2023, so we can continue leading the national movement to end forced and child marriage in all 50 U.S. states.
A generous donor will match every dollar you give, up to $75,000.
Are you a rockstar who’s passionate about ending forced and child marriage in the U.S.? Do you have at least three years of professional experience? Do you have excellent written and oral communication skills? Are you detail oriented and highly organized?
Then you might be our next Advocacy Associate! Learn more and apply now (but only if you want a deeply meaningful, adventure-filled job that makes all your friends jealous).
While we’d love to simply shout, “Alohomora!” and unlock survivors’ metaphorical chains, escaping a forced marriage and rebuilding a life takes a lot more work than just casting a spell.
One of the many ways we support forced and child marriage survivors is by hosting an annual retreat to give our clients and their children a day of fun — and to give survivors a chance to meet, mingle and share their inspiring stories. Our clients are at all different stages in their journeys, and these retreats help them build a network of support with one another. After all, in the words of the late, great Albus Dumbledore, “You need your friends.”
So this year, we took Dumbledore’s advice and headed to Broadway on Sunday to celebrate Halloween early and watch the spellbinding play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” We gathered for a group lunch beforehand, then we headed to the Lyric Theatre to immerse ourselves in the Wizarding World.
Last year, we watched “Aladdin” on Broadway together, and in years past, we’ve taken group day trips to Six Flags theme park.
Please make an unbreakable vow to support our work so we can continue to uplift survivors escaping forced and child marriages and provide powerful experiences for them to encourage and share with each other.
“Forced marriage is not a small problem. Little research has been done on forced marriage in the U.S., so the full extent of it remains unknown – but we’re changing that. One of the most effective strategies we at Unchained use to achieve social, policy and legal reform is to conduct groundbreaking research and use the findings to educate and build support among policymakers, faith leaders, service providers, judges, law enforcement personnel, parents and the general public. MOVE is arming grassroots activists inside the community with the data they need to effect change, as it also aims to launch a national conversation about marital, sexual and reproductive self-determination in all American communities.”Learn more about MOVE and our work to end forced marriage here and see photos from our launch event above. MOVE is made possible by generous support from New York Community Trust, Valentine Perry Snyder Fund and other donors.
Every several years, all U.N. Member States submit a periodic report to the U.N. Human Rights Committee summarizing their implementation of the rights laid out in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a treaty adopted in 1966. These reports are reviewed through an interactive discussion between the State under review and other U.N. Member States, resulting in an “outcome report” and recommendations for improvement. As part of of this process, the Committee considers joint submissions written by stakeholders including NGOs, national human rights institutions, human rights defenders, academic institutions and research institutes.
Together with Equality Now, the ERA Coalition, the US End FGM/C Network and the Alliance for Universal Digital Rights, we have written a joint submission for the Committee, emphasizing the United States’ failure to end child marriage.
In addition to the U.S.’s negligence regarding child marriage, our submission notes other major failings pertaining to the ICCPR, including the lack of an explicit right to equality on the basis of sex, the lack of comprehensive protections against female genital mutilation and the continued prevalence of online sexual exploitation and abuse.
It’s time for the United States to be held accountable.
Read the full joint submission here.
California law allows parents to marry off children of any age. More than 8,000 children in California are married each year, giving thousands of get-out-of-jail-free cards to child rapists — since sex with a child under age 18 is a crime in California, unless the perpetrator first marries the child.
For the first time in history, we have achieved THREE legislative victories in one year — and have now helped to end child marriage in 20 percent of the country. The 7.5 million girls who live in those states can no longer be legally subjected to a human rights abuse and nightmarish legal trap that destroys nearly every aspect of their lives. Only 40 states to go.
You might remember that Gov. Whitmer signed most of the 10-bill package to ban child marriage back in July, but a last-minute procedural snafu held up the rest of the package, so we had to wait until today to celebrate with “Big Gretch.”
Bills to end child marriage died in the legislature during the past three legislative sessions, but we kept fighting. Under the leadership of Sen. Sarah Anthony and Rep. Kara Hope and alongside our allies in the Michigan Coalition to End Child Marriage, we Chained-In at the state capitol, in bridal gowns and chains, to urge legislators to finally take action and end child marriage in Michigan — something we’ve been pushing them to do for six years. We met one-on-one with nearly every Michigan state legislator. 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 it worked!
Supporters like Roberts Family Foundation, Focus For Health and the Jewish Women’s Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago made our work possible with their generosity. And you made this victory possible, if you took action on our email campaigns, shared our posts on social media or supported us financially.
Until now, dangerous legal loopholes in Michigan allowed 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 did not want to marry — and 5,426 children were entered into marriage in Michigan between 2000 and 2021, including 12 children who were not old enough to consent to sex. Some 95% of the children were girls wed to adult men an average of 4.3 years older — often with devastating, lifelong consequences for the girls. There’s a reason the U.S. State Department has called marriage before 18 a “human rights abuse” that destroys almost every aspect of an American girl’s life.
Further, marriage before age 18 creates a nightmarish legal trap: Even the most mature minor faces overwhelming legal and practical barriers if they try to resist or escape a forced marriage.
Michigan has now joined Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut in embracing the simple, commonsense legislative solution we are pushing in all 50 U.S. states: Set the marriage age at 18, without exceptions. Such legislation harms no one, costs nothing and ends a human rights abuse.
We promise to keep pushing to make sure the U.S. keeps its promise under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to end forced and child marriage by year 2030.
Your support makes that possible! Please donate now.
The Michigan Coalition to End Child Marriage includes:
The victory came after Unchained At Last, a nonprofit working to end forced and child marriage, joined other groups in filing a friend-of-the-court brief with the appellate court to urge justice for the woman, to whom the appellate division referred as L.B.B.
L.B.B. had taken to social media to express anguish that her husband was withholding a get, or a religious divorce. Under Orthodox Jewish law, only a man is allowed to grant a divorce. L.B.B. asked her community to press her husband to release her from their marriage.
Accepting arguments grounded in antisemitic tropes, the trial court determined that L.B.B.’s plea for help was a form of harassment and an incitement to violence, and it ordered L.B.B. to remove her posts and refrain from speaking again about her status as an agunah, or “chained woman” – the term for a woman whose husband refuses to give her a get.
“When L tried to get help to end her suffering as an agunah, the trial court responded by tightening her shackles and silencing her,” said our founder/executive director Fraidy Reiss, herself a forced marriage survivor from the Orthodox Jewish community.
We joined the ACLU of New Jersey, the ACLU, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance and Sanctuary for Families to file a friend-of-the-court brief that affirmed that the state and federal constitutions protect speech by a person experiencing abuse and seeking her community’s support. The Organization for the Resolution of Agunot and the Shalom Task Force filed a separate brief that explained the social and cultural context of “get refusal” in Orthodox Jewish communities and the ramifications of silencing a person in that situation while they are asking for help.
In a published opinion released today, the three-judge appellate panel ruled unanimously that the First Amendment and its state constitutional analog protect L.B.B.’s right to describe her experiences trapped in a religious marriage and to seek her community’s aid.
“Fortunately, the appellate decision dissolves L.B.B.’s legal binds, freeing her to exercise her First Amendment rights,” Fraidy said.
We are looking to hire our first-ever Operations Manager to keep our direct-services and systems-change programs running smoothly as we push to end forced and child marriage in the U.S. You might be a good fit for this $90,000-per-year role if you:
Learn more and apply here before someone else steals this exciting and unique opportunity.
