Why are minors allowed to marry in the U.S.?
Research shows that around 248,000 children wed in America from 2000 to 2010
She gave birth when she was 10 years old. When she turned 11, Sherry Johnson’s parents, members of a conservative Pentecostal Church, decided she should marry her 20-year-old rapist. Their reasoning? Marriage would deflect a pending criminal case against the man who impregnated little Sherry and help protect the reputation of the church. Amazingly, a clerk in Pinellas County, Fla., issued a marriage license (which duly noted Sherry’s birth date as 11 years earlier) and the deed was done.
Johnson’s case occurred back in the ’70s. But if you think child brides are a thing of the past in America you would be wrong.
According to a nonprofit group called Unchained at Last, the practice continues to this day. And frequently the children are married off to older spouses with an age difference that constitutes statutory rape. In what world is this OK?
Unchained at Last was founded by Fraidy Reiss, a woman who says her ultra-Orthodox Jewish family forced her into an unwanted marriage at age 19 to a violent man she despised. After a dozen years, Reiss found the strength to escape with her two daughters, earn a college degree, become a working journalist and a licensed private investigator.
Reiss’s group spent the past year collecting the latest marriage license data (from 2000 to 2010) and what they found was shocking. In the 38 states that keep age statistics, there were more than 167,000 children, almost all of them girls, who had been legally married.
Many states have a marriage license category labeled “14 and younger,” so it is not known precisely how young America’s brides and grooms might have been. Unchained at Last discovered 12-year-old girls who married in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina. In one 2006 New Jersey case, the group says it discovered a 10-year-old boy was married to an 18-yearold woman. Surprisingly, more than half of all U.S. states have no firm minimum age for marriage.
Writing in the Washington Post, Reiss drew this conclusion: “Based on the correlation we identified between state population and child marriage, we estimated that the total number of children wed in America between 2000 and 2010 was nearly 248,000.”
Nearly a quarter of a million minors allowed to marry! How and why is this allowed to happen?
In all but two states, the age of consent for marriage is 18. (In Nebraska it’s 17 and in Mississippi the age of consent is 17 for boys and 15 for girls.) But there are wideranging exceptions. Parents can give consent for their minor child. And then there are states in which judicial consent is also required. In my opinion, too many parents urge (or demand) marriage and too many judges give their permission under the misguided premise that if a child is pregnant, marriage is the best course of action. It clearly is not.
Two-thirds of underage marriages don’t last, according to one study. And the youngest spouse (again, usually the female) is often left in poverty with at least one child, an interrupted education, no work history, the inability to sign a lease, buy a car and few options to make a successful life. And a minor who seeks protection in a domestic abuse shelter is often turned away for being underage. These young people lose at every turn.
Ironically, a U.S. State Department report published last year condemned countries that allowed child marriage. The report called it a human rights abuse that “produces devastating repercussions for a girl’s life, effectively ending her childhood” by forcing her “into adulthood and motherhood before she is physically and mentally mature.”
Reiss’s group would like to see a blanket ban on all under-18 marriages. They got close to that goal in New Jersey recently where just such a bill had passed both houses of the legislature. However, Gov. Chris Christie vetoed the legislation, saying it didn’t “comport with the sensibilities and, in some cases, the religious customs, of the people of this state.”
Across the country, several states have, or will soon consider, over-18-only marriage legislation. But many lawmakers are convinced such a bill might unlawfully stifle religious freedom. And they cling to that idea that a baby must be born in wedlock. Religious groups and various cultural associations in which arranged marriages are the norm, are lobbying hard against the idea.
To be fair, it’s not just parents forcing early marriage. There are plenty of minors convinced they are ready for holy matrimony, too. But when these unions fail, guess who picks up the financial burden? That’s right, you and me. Taxpayer funded welfare programs — from food stamps and Medicaid to lowincome housing costs — are often the only lifeline available.
Sherry Johnson looks back now and declares, “It was a terrible life.” She was a child raising children — nine of them in all. She still wonders why the state didn’t handcuff her husband for raping her. Instead, they handcuffed her to a hopeless life.
“Why allow someone to marry when they’re still so young,” she asks. “Why?”
That is a very good question.