Minor struggles

Child brides join push to raise legal marriage age

WASHINGTON— Most Americans think of child marriage as a vestige of a bygone era. And yet in every state, people under 18 are allowed to marry.

Some states set minimum ages for brides and grooms—sometimes as low as 13 or 14—and usually require the permission of a parent, judge, or both before a minor can wed. But laws in about half the states allow children of any age to marry, as long as they receive the proper permission.

That may be changing. This year legislators in 10 states have introduced bills to raise the marriage age. Proponents say updating marriage laws, which in many states are more than a century old, will help protect children from being pushed into marriages by parents and predators. Some lawmakers, disturbed by instances of pregnant girls heading to the courthouse to marry older men, argue that marriage licenses should not be given to men who have committed statutory rape.

Young brides who say they were forced down the aisle are backing the efforts, as are justices of the peace who say current law requires them to approve marriages between young girls and older men.

“Fourteen was just ridiculous,” said New York Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, a Democrat who sponsored a bill this year that would align the age for marriage with the state’s age of sexual consent, 17. Minors still would need parental and judicial permission to marry.

Proponents of raising the marriage age had some success in Virginia, where girls under 16 were permitted to marry if they were pregnant. A law enacted last year requires 16- and 17-year-olds to be given adult status from a court before they can marry.

But Republican Gov. Chris Christie vetoed a bill on May 11 that would have made New Jersey the first state to outlaw marriage for anyone under 18. Under state law, people under 18 need parental permission to marry, and those under 16 must also have a judge’s consent.

In California, a Senate bill to eliminate the process that allows those under 18 to marry was weakened in committee last week after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of California said the measure unnec who were 15 or younger got married in Missouri, according to the state.

Her bill, passed by the House in March, would allow those under 18 to get married only after a judge approves it and determines there is no evidence of coercion. Those under 17 would not be able to marry someone older than 20, a relationship that could violate the state’s statutory rape law.

Jeanne Smoot with the Tahirih Justice Center, a gender equality group that has pushed legislation in several states, including New Hampshire, to raise the marriage age to 18, said people who want to marry someone young look for nearby states with looser laws where perhaps only one parent’s signature is required or where they may not have to face a judge.

“Certainly that’s the kind of destination wedding reputation no state should want, and yet they already have it,” Smoot said.

Child marriages represent a small share of total marriages in the U.S., but still number in the tens of thousands. Nearly 60,000 15- to 17-yearolds, nearly five out of every 1,000, were in marriages in 2014.

Those who marry as children face a unique set of potential legal complications, particularly if they want to leave the marriage. In some states, people under 18 are not permitted to get divorced. Most domestic violence shelters won’t accept people under 18. And because they are legally still children, those who try to escape a marriage may be returned by social services to the parents who approved the marriage in the first place. Much of the debate centers around whether adolescents are mature enough to make decisions about their future, and whether parents and judges can be trusted to advise them. Girls who get married before they turn 18 are a diverse group: pregnant teens who either want to or are pressured to raise their child within wedlock; girls from strict religious communities or social backgrounds in which arranged marriages at a young age is common; girls with an abusive home life whose parents struggle to care for them.

“It’s definitely not one group, one religion, one ethnicity,” said Fraidy Reiss, founder of Unchained At Last, a New Jersey-based group that helps young women escape marriages that have been arranged or coerced.

“The one thread we see is they’re mostly female,” said Reiss, who was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in New Jersey and married at 19 to a man chosen by her parents.

This year legislators in 10 states have introduced bills to raise the marriage age.