Every year, millions of little girls and boys are victim of early and forced marriage across the world. The phenomenon is also happening in the United States, but more and more organizations speak out against this practice.

Each year, 15 million girls are married before the age of 18 according to UNICEF. 700 million women alive today were married as children, and they could be 1.2 billion by 2050 if nothing is done to reduce child marriage. While early marriage concerns both boys and girls,the overwhelming majority of married children are girls.

Child, early and forced marriage is defined by the U.S. government as a formal marriage or informal union where one or both parties is under the age of 18. People usually think this practice only happens in developing countries, where families force their daughter to early marriage for economic or cultural reasons. It is mostly true. But it also happens in the United States in 2017.

According to Unchained at Last, an NGO that fights against child marriage in the country, around 248,000 children as young as 10 were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010. In 77% of the cases, it concerned minors girls with adult men.

In August 2017, the Tahirih Justice Center published a report on early marriage in the U.S., and how laws allow this practice to happen in today’s America. According the report, in October 2017, if the legal age of marriage is supposed to be 18 in all fifty states, twenty-five of them do not set any minimum age to get married. Nine states expressly permit pregnancy to lower the minimum marriage age, even in case of rape.

Legal loopholes

Fraidy Reiss is the founder of Unchained at Last. This non-profit organisation aims to « help women and girls to avoid forced marriage and rebuild their lives » by creating social, policy and legal change to end child marriage in America. In a speech at the global Trust Conference in London in November 2017, she explained that there were two legal loopholes that allow marriage before 18 in the country: parental consent, and judicial or clerk approval. The first exception is very common. The perpetrators of child marriage are most of the time the parents who sign the marriage licence application.

Unchained at Last might be the only organisation fully dedicated to forced and child marriage in the United States, it is certainly not the only one to work on tackling this issue. Girls not Brides, the International Women Health Coalition, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch (HRW) are some of the NGOs who are committed to change the law on child marriage to make it illegal.

In October 2017, HRW, along with Unchained at Last, launched a campaign to end child marriage in Florida. In this state, 16,000 girls were married under 18 between 2000 and 2015. In an article published on HRW website on October 20th, Heather Barr, a senior researcher at the Women’s rights division, assures Afghanistan has a tougher law on child marriage than Florida does. In Afghanistan, girls can marry from 15 with their father’s or a judicial consent ; in Florida, pregnant girls can get married at any age if a judge approves it, just like in Saudi Arabia or Yemen. But this could change in the next months as a Senate committee recently approved a bill that would end child marriage in the state.

Domestic and sexual abuse

Child marriage represents, in many ways, a serious abuse of power in our modern society. Tahiri Justice Center wrote in its report that it is likely that « girls who enters or are forced into child marriage are also experiencing high rates of abuse ». Girls who marry before 19 are 50% more likely to drop out high school, and they experience higher rates of psychiatric disorders, as well as domestic violence and sexual abuse. Girls married too young are exposed to greater risks of sexually transmitted infection and early pregnancy that could kill them.

For Fraidy Reiss, « marriage before age 18 devastates girls’ health and education opportunities and increases the risk of being beaten by their spouse ». She considers as evil the idea of giving children the socalled right to enter into a « really important contract before they have the rights of an adult « .

Changing the legislation

In their fight to reduce and eventually stop child marriage across the United States, the campaigners put forward one thing which should be the first step. According to Tahiri Justice Center, « the simplest route to robust protection is to set the floor for marriage at age 18 », without any exception.

In 2016, Virginia became the first state to limit the marriage to adults aged 18 or older. In June 2017, states of Texas and New York followed the same path and passed bipartisan bills to set minimum age of marriage at 18, and established meaningful safeguards against forced marriage. They only allow very few exceptions for 16 and 17 year-old emancipated teens.

There is still a long way to go to change the legislation in all the states. According to Fraidy Reiss, the first thing that prevents legislation on child marriage to pass is misogyny. Many males legislators have insisted that if a girl gets pregnant, she has no choice but to marry, even if she was raped. For her, we need more female legislators.

There is also the cultural barrier. Many girls and young women feel forced to get married. In some religious communities, early marriage is a common practice and if the woman wants to leave to get divorced or leave her husband, she will have to face reprobation from her community and her family. More than one are dissuaded by this reject.

A human right abuse

Thereby, if changing the law will be a significant step forward, changing mentalities is as important, perhaps even more essential. Unchained at Last underlines that progress has been made, but warns much work remains to be done.

The United States Department of State declared in a study on Global Strategy to empower adolescent girls in March 2016 that child marriage is a “human rights abuse.” As one of the biggest donor countries in the fight against this practice, the U.S. need to show it is committed to it not only abroad, but at home as well.

Lucie Jung

Article written for the class of News and Current Affairs delivered by Dr. Sarah Pickard

(Photo credit: cc/Maxpixels)