Child marriage in US
WHEN she was 11, Sherry Johnson found out that she was to be married to a 20-year-old member of her church who had raped her.
“It was forced on me,” she recalls.
She had become pregnant, she says, and child welfare authorities were investigating. Her family and church officials decided the simplest way to avoid a messy criminal case was to organise a wedding. A clerk in Tampa, Florida, refused to marry an 11-year-old, although this was legal in the state. The wedding party went to nearby Pinellas County, where the clerk issued a marriage licence, which lists her birth date, so officials were aware of her age.
The marriage didn’t work out. Two-thirds of marriages of underage girls don’t last, one study found. Today, Johnson is campaigning for a state law to curb underage marriages, part of a nationwide movement to end child marriage in America. Meanwhile, children 16 and younger are still being married in Florida.
More than 167,000 people age 17 and younger were married in 38 states from 2000 to 2010, according to a search of marriage licence data by Unchained at Last, a group that aims to ban child marriage. The search turned up cases of 12-year-old girls married in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina. The group was not able to get data for the other states, but the Census Bureau says at least 57,800 Americans ages 15 to 17 reported being in marriages in 2014.
Among the states with the highest rates of child marriages were Arkansas, Idaho and Kentucky. The number of child marriages has been falling, but every state still lets underage girls marry, typically with the consent of parents, a judge or both. Twenty-seven states do not set a minimum age by law, according to the Tahirih Justice Center’s Forced Marriage Initiative.
Johnson, who is fighting for Florida to set a minimum marriage age, says her family attended a conservative Pentecostal church, and other girls of a similar age periodically also married. Often, she says, this was to hide rapes by church elders. She says she was raped by both a minister and a parishioner and gave birth to a daughter when she was 10. “It was a terrible life,” she recalls. She ended up with nine children in all, while her husband periodically abandoned her. “They took the handcuffs from handcuffing him,” she says, referring to the risk he faced of arrest for rape, “to handcuffing me”.
“You can’t get a job, you can’t get a car, you can’t get a licence, you can’t sign a lease,” she adds. “So why allow someone to marry when they’re still so young?”
The US has denounced child marriage in other countries as a “human rights abuse that contributes to economic hardship”, according to a US State Department document published last year. Let’s listen to ourselves. State legislators must understand that child marriage is devastating in Niger and Afghanistan, and also in New York and Florida. It’s past time to end child marriage right here at home.