The faces of child marriage in the United States
In a previous post I made, I shared photos and captions discussing the reality of child marriage that occurred in third world countries.
It's important to understand that the issue of forced child marriage isn't limited to the third world, and also occurs in first world nations such as the United States.
Angela, pictured here, was 13 years old when she was forced by her mother to marry. After the forced marriaged, Angela became pregnant at 15 and her ex husband soon became abusive.
"Sherry Johnson was just 11 years old when she was forced to marry a 20-year-old deacon from her insular Pentecostal church community in Florida. Johnson says he raped her when she was 10 years old; the rape resulted in a pregnancy. Johnson says her church community, including her mother, covered up the rape – and forced her to marry her rapist. During her marriage, her husband sexually and emotionally abused the young girl."
"Michelle DeMello walked into the clerk’s office in Colorado thinking for sure someone would save her.
She was 16 and pregnant. Her Christian community in Green Mountain Falls was pressuring her family to marry her off to her 19-year-old boyfriend. She didn’t think she had the right to say no to the marriage after the mess she felt she’d made. “I could be the example of the shining whore in town, or I could be what everybody wanted me to be at that moment and save my family a lot of honor,” DeMello said. She assumed that the clerk would refuse to approve the marriage. The law wouldn’t allow a minor to marry, right?"
Naila Amin was just 13 years old when her parents took her from her home in Queens, New York, to Pakistan so that she could marry her 26-year-old cousin. At the time, the legal age for marriage in her home state was 14.
After the marriage, she returned to the United States but after her parents discovered she had a boyfriend, they forced her to return to Pakistan to live with her husband until she was 18.
Although the marriage technically took place in Pakistan, it's still important to highlight. "Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, there is no minimum age requirement for a person to sponsor a spouse or fiancée to come to the U.S. In practice, this means an American child can sponsor their foreign spouse provided the marriage is legal in both the country where it happened and the state where the couple intends to live. Amin's parents reasoned that if they married her shortly before her 14th birthday, she could file for her new husband's visa right away."
Naila was raped by her husband while living in Pakistan and was only freed when she had to return to the US due to CPS being called as a result of her lack of attendance at school.
Between 2000 and 2015, it was reported that that over 200,000 children were married in the United States. The number is undoubtedly higher since some states do not report the data. 87% of those children were girls and overwhelming majority of their husbands were adult men.
"Currently, only four US states (New Jersey, Delaware, Minnesota and Pennsylvania) prohibit marriage below the age of 18 outright. Some states have no minimum age requirement if there is parental or judicial approval and other states have a young minimum age. In North Carolina and Alaska, a 14-year-old can marry with judicial approval. But often, judges hearing these cases are not an adequate safeguard for these children and are not trained in family and children’s issues.
“When judicial approval is needed for a child to be married, one might expect that this is because judges have certain training in trauma and child abuse that might inform their granting of an exception. This is not, however, usually the case,” says Dr Sarah Gundle, a clinical psychologist in New York City, who works extensively with trauma survivors. “While many judges have come to realise that understanding the impact of trauma may lead to better outcomes, there is no systematic, trauma-informed training they must undergo to become a judge. The result is that the courts don’t systematically provide protection for these girls and the consequences for these judicial exceptions to marriage laws can be dire.”
In some states, it is not even a judge but a county clerk who has the authority to approve the licence for a child marriage."
Child brides in the United States are also in a unique situation where although they are old enough to be married, they are not old enough to receive help from domestic violence shelters.
"Child brides in America can find themselves in the position of being deemed old enough to marry, but too young to be admitted to a domestic violence shelter (children can be admitted to a shelter if they are coming with a parent). Many shelters will not take young girls fleeing domestic abuse because of antiquated “harbouring-a-runaway” laws and licensing requirements which create significant obstacles for them to leave an abuser."
While some have introduced legislation to ban under 18 marriage with no exception, there have been opposition from groups such as the ACLU.
"The ACLU Northern California chapters, along with the Children's Law Center of California, opposed the bill, claiming estimates of the scale of the problem were overblown. They cited Los Angeles County, where just 44 petitions for marriage by a minor we made in 2017 out of a population of 10 million. The groups argued that the new law would strip youth of their right to form their families and eliminate one of the only pathways to exit the foster care system through emancipation."
The states in red do not have a minimum age of marriage
To learn more about resources for child marriage in the United States visit unchainedatlast.org, ncadv.org, and www.thehotline.org.
Sources from which the information was taken. Statements in quotations are directly from the source material.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/features/2020/12/24/america-women-and-girls-forced-into-marriage?__twitter_impression=true
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.kmov.com/news/i-was-a-passport-to-this-man-bill-to-close-child-marriage-loopholes-languishes-in/article_2715f542-fefb-11e9-879c-437b67353082.amp.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/child-marriage-in-us-cbsn-originals/
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/inspirational-stories/a40323/child-marriage/
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-41727495
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