Virginia can again lead the cause to end child marriage
Child marriage is probably one of the last topics on Virginians’ minds these days. But as a Virginia resident and as someone who serves people threatened with forced and child marriage every day, this issue is something I cannot ignore.
That’s why I was excited to see legislation introduced in this year’s General Assembly that would raise the minimum age of marriage in Virginia to 18, with no exceptions and thrilled when it passed the House with bi-partisan support last week.
As detailed by reporting in The Washington Post, child marriage is far more prevalent in the United States than most people think. More than 300,000 children married across the country between 2000 and 2018, and it’s only since 2016 that states have started taking serious steps to limit or end child marriage.
In 2016, Virginia became a leader in the modern fight against child marriage by becoming one of the first states to restrict marriage to people who are 18, with a narrow exception for 16- and 17-year-olds emancipated through a unique court process. And while the number of children married in this state has decreased since then, the sobering reality is that kids in Virginia are still being married every year, some with very concerning dynamics.
The Tahirih Justice Center, a national, non-profit organization that serves immigrant survivors of gender-based violence, helped draft this legislation and proudly supported the bill in 2016. It was a step in the right direction, but we have known all along that it wasn’t enough.
In 2018, 23 minors were married in Virginia. Among those is a 17-year-old who was approved by a judge to marry a 26-year-old, representing a nine-year age gap. According to Virginia law, sex between those two would otherwise be a class 1 misdemeanor. Since 2019, 27 more minors have married in Virginia, and each of them married an adult.
Children in Virginia continue to be vulnerable to forced marriages, especially in cases when parents are the one pressuring a child to get married because they think it is “the right thing to do.” Common dynamics include parents pressuring them to marry if they become pregnant, trying to cover up a rape or sexual assault by forcing a victim to marry their assailant, or even seeking to undermine custody arrangements by getting their child married without the other parent’s knowledge.
We know that child marriage, whether it is forced or not, can have disastrous, lifelong consequences for American girls. Teenage girls face intimate partner violence at much higher rates than adults. Girls who marry are 50% more likely to drop out of high school, are more likely to live in poverty, and have worse lifelong health outcomes.
The marriages themselves, whatever the starting point, do not often succeed either, with divorce rates up to 80%.
While there may be rare instances where two mature minors married and things “turned out OK,” that is truly the exception and not the rule. In the end, genuine couples can afford to wait to begin their “happily ever after” on behalf of those that are facing coercion, abuse and trafficking. And the fact is, their chances of success as partners, parents and people improve dramatically if they do wait to marry.
Virginia now has the chance to finish what it started in 2016 and become a leader — again — in the fight against child marriage. It’s time to pass legislation to end child marriage in our state once and for all.