For the second time in two weeks, Kentucky lawmakers have rejected a bill that would make it illegal for adults to marry young children. Currently, it is legal to do so.
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Between 2000 and 2015, at least 207,468 minors were married in the United States.
As Statista"s Martin Armstrong notes, despite an overall fall in child marriage since 2000 (25,583 to 9,247), there are still a shocking number of young children legally married in the country. Only 14 percent married other minors, meaning 86 percent wedded an adult.
As the infographic below shows, the youngest to marry since 2000 were three ten year olds.
You will find more statistics at Statista
According to Frontline, the three girls married men aged 24, 25 and 31 in Tennessee in 2001.
While certain conditions have to be met before a minor can marry, and consent from a parent or judge is usually required, every state in the U.S. allows children to marry to some extent.
In Oregon and Nebraska, for example, the lower limit is set at 17.
In 26 states, there is no minimum age for marriage.
Girls as young as ten are among more than 200,000 children wed to adults in the United States in just the past 15 years, as — despite minimum requirements a person reach the age of 18, or legal adulthood, nationally — a smattering of locations have preserved loopholes legally permitting child marriage.
Alarmingly, the number of children married away to fully mature adults could be much higher than the already-startling number — ten states provide only fragmentary statistics, or none at all.
And the loopholes don’t exist solely in theory — adults across the U.S. have actively opportuned the law to marry kids — even amid a decline in the number of marriages, overall.
To wit, three 10-year-old girls and an 11-year-old boy were among the hundreds of thousands of children and minors the system somehow permitted adults to lock into marriage — despite their bodies and minds not yet being fully developed.
“At least 207,468 minors married in the US between 2000 and 2015, according to data compiled by Unchained At Last, a group campaigning to abolish child marriage, and investigative documentary series Frontline,” The Independent reports.
Exemptions from the national marriage minimum age of 18 exist for circumstances like pregnancy and parental consent — in every state in the country.
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However, record-keeping remains inconsistent across the country, and details regarding the nature of child marriages — if unintended pregnancy made the union tenable, for instance — usually aren’t included.
Indeed, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie — citing conditions such as religious customs — bore the brunt of furious criticism recently for refusing to sign into law restrictions barring children under the age of 18 from tying the knot or entering a civil unions.
“I agree that protecting the wellbeing, dignity, and freedom of minors is vital,” Christie placated an irate populace, upon refusing to codify the law in early May, “but the severe bar this bill creates is not necessary to address the concerns voiced by the bill’s proponents and does not comport with the sensibilities and, in some cases, the religious customs, of the people of this State.”
Unchained At Last Founder and Executive Director Fraidy Reiss — herself, an albeit older victim of forced marriage — told Frontline that, upon first obtaining child marriage statistics for New Jersey, where her organization is based,
“I got that spreadsheet from the state health department, I was literally shaking.”
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Data for the state revealed just under 3,500 youth — largely 16- and 17-year-olds — wed adults between 1995 and 2012.
“That number was so much higher than I had thought it would be,” Reiss told the PBS program. “Then, the fact that the children were as young as 13 and the fact that it was mostly girls married to adult men.”
Across the U.S., insufficient data still show the number of marriages involving minors and children dropped by 61 percent in the decade between 2000 and 2010 — but even that figure could be wildly inaccurate without further information readily available.
Lest doubt take root, these figures haven’t been bloated by an excess of youth permitted to marry other youth — fully 86 percent of marriages analyzed with available data involved adults wedding kids under 18.
Frontline reports,
“The youngest children to marry were three 10-year-old girls in Tennessee in 2001, who were married to men ages 24, 25 and 31, according to state data. The youngest groom was an 11-year-old boy, also in Tennessee, who married a 27-year-old woman in 2006.
“Children as young as 12 were granted marriage licenses in Alaska, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
“Thirteen-year-olds were given the green light to marry in Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.”
Around the United States, adults — as old as the 74-year-old Alabama man, whose bride was six decades his junior — ostensibly committed to lifetime relationships with three 10-year-olds, two 11-year-olds, ten 12-year-olds, fifty-one 13-year-olds, and 985 children aged 14.
Of course, individual states’ legal loopholes don’t necessarily jibe with federal mandates pertaining to marriageable age — not to mention the gross breach of social mores and protections for children.
Frontline suggests this odd and astonishing discrepancy — if not outright hypocrisy — leaves cavernous gaps in consistency of law:
“Most states set the age of sexual consent between 16 and 18. A person can be charged with sexual abuse or statutory rape for having sex with a minor. Yet, we found numerous examples of children who were given marriage licenses before they could legally consent to sex. These marriages were almost always approved by court clerks and judges.”
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Advocates working to close gaping loopholes caution that age cannot necessarily be the primary indicator of a distressing betrothal.
“A large age difference is an automatic red flag, but a small age difference is not an automatic green flag,” attorney Jeanne Smoot, of the Tahirih Justice Center, which works to eradicate all marriages involving minors, told Frontline, adding authorities rarely pursue charges against adults in marriages to kids, as “the same acts that would be statutory rape outside of marriage are made lawful within.”
Most states allowing adults to take a child spouse require the consent of one or both parents, permission from a judge, or some combination thereof — however, there is a rather astonishing footnote to this underbelly of marriage and child love in the United States.
Frontline notes,
“In 26 states, there’s no minimum marriage age, according to the Tahirih Justice Center. Children in those states can get married at any age if certain conditions are met.”
Few people in the U.S. would publicly advocate the need for children as young as 12 to marry; yet, Governor Chris Christie not only believes religious freedom erases Western mores about child marriage, he codified that personal belief for New Jersey residents — by vetoing a bill which would have banned the practice, outright.
“I agree that protecting the well-being, dignity, and freedom of minors is vital,” Christie opined, “but the severe bar this bill creates is not necessary to address the concerns voiced by the bill’s proponents and does not comport with the sensibilities and, in some cases, the religious customs, of the people of this State.”
Christie stunned lawmakers in his conditional refusal to sign into law A3091, which would have barred “persons under age 18 from marrying or entering into a civil union,” according to its text.
According to Politico, Republican Assemblywoman Nancy Munoz — a legislator from Christie’s own party — led sponsorship of the bill, which garnered virtually full support from the New Jersey Senate and Assembly, after hearing “compelling” anecdotal testimony from minors who had been forced into marriage under religious pretenses.
Nevertheless, Christie proffered religion as a central focus to rubber-stamping the continuation of legal child marriage in his state.
“Underage marriage is widespread in the United States, where about 170,000 children were wed between 2000 and 2010 in 38 of the 50 states where data was available, according to activists,” Reuters reports.
“Although age 18 is the minimum for marriage in most of the nation, every state has legal loopholes allowing children to wed.”
Indeed, definitive reasons may exist for minors to marry — opposition cited pregnancy or that 17-year-olds may enlist in the military with parental consent — but the law as it stands allows children under the age of 16 to wed with permission of a family court judge.
“An exclusion without exceptions would violate the cultures and traditions of some communities in New Jersey based on religious traditions,” Christie explained.
While maturity cannot be dictated by age, detractors feel the potential for abuse, mental health concerns, and the inherent rights of minors overwhelmingly preclude the dictates of any religious doctrine — leaving the legality of underage marriage untouched while exceptions are debated seems unwise.
Reuters notes, “Studies have shown that child marriage is associated with mental health problems, poverty and increased high school drop-out rates.”
“The shocking truth is that child marriage is legal right now in New Jersey, and it’s shocking that thousands of children have been married here recently, most of them minor girls married to adult men,” Fraidy Reiss, executive director of the nonprofit Unchained At Last, told the state’s Assembly last year.
Reiss also noted, reports Politico, “that almost 3,500 marriages involving at least one partner under 18 took place in New Jersey from 1995 to 2012. Of those, 163 involved at least one spouse 15 or younger. Most were religious arranged marriages.”
New Jersey isn’t alone, by far, in allowing teens — and, in some instances, preteens — to wed, though Americans would be shocked at a comparison to the rest of the planet.
Although the age at which each state allows exceptions for minors to marry varies greatly, several, including Massachusetts, will give the green light for the marriage of children as young as 12 to a partner — but that prospective spouse rarely also is underage.
Most often, child marriages involve underage adolescent girls and men decades their senior.
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“In Virginia itself,” The Independent reported in March, “according to state health statistics, more than 4,500 minors were married between 2000 and 2013, including about 220 who were 15 or younger.”
That any of the United States permit 12-year-olds to wed puts the nation on a questionable level matched only by war-torn Yemen and opprobrious human rights-abuser, Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, anti-choice activists rallied against the bill under the auspices pregnant youth should be allowed to marry under because it would be better for offspring.
Although the governor’s refusal to sign A3091 leaves New Jersey in line with multiple U.S. states on the topic, his conditional veto came with the proposal to ban marriage entirely for those under 16 years of age and require consent from a judge before 16- and 17-year-olds could wed.
“It is disingenuous to hold that a 16-year-old may never consent to marriage, although New Jersey law permits the very same 16-year-old to consent to sex or obtain an abortion without so much as parental knowledge, let alone consent,” Christie, quoted by Politico, asserted in the veto. “That inconsistency in logic undercuts the alleged logic of an outright ban.”
Munoz — bewildered, disappointed, and unsure precisely how to proceed — retained measured optimism in the governor’s suggestions that the restrictions on child marriage may still find their way into the New Jersey law books.
“It’s not an absolute veto, which is good,” she told Reuters.
Christie would likely sign the bill into law should legislators append its text to include his recommendations on age-specific exceptions.
“I thought it was a good bill,” Munoz continued. “I thought it was OK to be first in the country on this.”
