You know it’s good news when you see Kermit dancing: Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe just signed the legislation we have been pushing relentlessly, to ban child marriage!
This means we have achieved historic legislative victories in ONE THIRD of the U.S. Specifically, we are now 16 states, one district and two territories down in our national movement to set the marriage age at 18, no exceptions — and end a human rights abuse and nightmarish legal trap that destroys girls’ lives. What a victory for the more than 10.7 million girls who live in those areas.
Alongside our allies in the Missouri Coalition to End Child Marriage that we convened, as well as legislative champions like Reps. Renee Reuter, Melissa Schmidt and Holly Jones and Sens. Tracy McCreery, Rick Brattin and Holly Thompson Rehder, we met one-on-one with almost every member of Missouri legislature. 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 the governor.
And it worked!
You made this victory possible, too, if you took action on our email campaigns, shared our posts on social media or supported us financially.
Missouri took an important first step in 2018 toward ending child marriage by raising the marriage age to 16, but that law didn’t go far enough: Some 88% of the minors who married in Missouri before the 2018 law change were aged 16 or 17, so the 2018 law change failed to protect 88% of those impacted by child marriage. Prior to 2018, the law allowed a parent to marry off a child of any age, with a requirement for judicial approval if the child were aged 14 or younger.
The new legislation closes the dangerous legal loopholes that allow parents to enter a 16- or 17-year-old into marriage without any input required from the teen, and without any real legal recourse for a teen who does not want to marry.
Our research found that 8,362 minors as young as 13 were entered into marriage in Missouri between 2000 and 2023 — and 77% of those were girls wed to adult men.
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.”
Missouri has now joined 15 other states (Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine and Oregon), two territories (American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands) and Washington, D.C. in embracing the simple, commonsense legislative solution we are pushing in all 50 U.S. states to ban child marriage, without exceptions. Such legislation harms no one, costs nothing and ends a human rights abuse.
That leaves only 34 states and three territories — and 26.6 million girls — to go. Let’s do this.
The Missouri Coalition to End Child Marriage includes:
