Delaware leads effort to end child marriages in America

Dawn Tyree was 11 years old when a family friend began to molest her. A bit more than a year later, she became pregnant from these rapes, and her parents found out what had been going on. But they didn’t go to the police; instead, they found another solution.

“It was decided for me that I would marry him,” Tyree recalled.

So Tyree, then 13, was married to her rapist, then age 32. She became one of the thousands of underage American girls who are married each year, often sacrificing their futures to reduce embarrassment to their parents. Statutory rape is thus sanctioned by the state as marriage, and the abuser ends up not in handcuffs but showered with wedding gifts.

Our State Department protests child marriage in Africa and Asia, but every state in America allowed child marriages. That has finally changed. Last month Delaware became the first state to ban all child marriages, without exception.

“This is a historic moment for women and girls, where we’re finally ending this relic from a sexist past that is destroying girls’ lives,” said Fraidy Reiss, who runs an organization, Unchained at Last, that fights child marriage. “It shouldn’t have been this difficult.”

One study by Unchained at Last estimated that there were nearly a quarter-million child marriages in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010.

States set a minimum age of 18, but they also allow exceptions, such as with the approval of parents or a court, or when a girl is pregnant. Indeed, 20 states don’t set any minimum statutory age for marriage, according to the Tahirih Justice Center’s Forced Marriage Initiative.

Publicity and heroic efforts of many activists, prodded legislators to re-examine the issue, but the strongest opposition to a change has come from conservatives who argue that a pregnant girl should be able to marry the unborn child’s father. The idea is that such a marriage will avert an abortion, or at least increase the prospect that the child is raised by a married couple rather than by a struggling single parent.

I understand the goal. But in practice, these marriages involving child brides often don’t succeed and frequently lead to marriages between a young girl and her older rapist.

But marriage often ends a girl’s education, and when something goes wrong, a 16- or 17-year-old wife faces particular difficulties: She cannot flee to a domestic violence shelter, which typically will not take anyone under 18, and in some states, an underage girl fleeing an abusive marriage is legally a runaway.

Marriage laws are mostly a matter for the states, but there is room for federal action. American girls in immigrant families are sometimes pressured to marry a distant relative abroad as a way of bringing him to the United States, and it should be a simple matter to ban spouse visas unless both parties were 18 at the time of the marriage.

It’s frustrating that legislators cling to archaic marriage laws linked to so much abuse; at Unchained at Last, the spreadsheet listing marriage laws by state is labeled “BYHAWS,” short for Banging Your Head Against the Wall Spreadsheet. But now, with Delaware leading, it seems the wall may finally be giving way.

“We finally have one state that shows us that it’s possible,” Reiss told me. “One state down, 49 to go.”