WHEN APRIL KELLEY was 15 she was married, against her will, to a family friend seven years her senior. He drove her six hours from her home state of Arkansas into Missouri, which then had looser laws governing the marriage of minors. April remembers a county clerk at the ceremony peering at her tear-stained face and asking if she wanted to go ahead; she was too terrified to reply, she recalls. Her mother and husband-to-be nodded their assent.
Back in Arkansas, she lived with her in-laws. April’s husband would take her out of school at lunch break to have sex and often kept her home, sending fake medical notes to her teachers. He would not even let her shower alone. More than a decade later, April cries as she describes the experience, which she endured for a little over a year. After her father-in-law started acting lasciviously towards her, she ran away.
Laws ought to protect children from such horrors, but America’s too often do not. Though most states have a minimum marrying age of 18, most also have exceptions—generally, by the consent of a parent or approval of a judge. Missouri is one of 14 states (as well as Washington, DC) that gives county clerks rather than judges the power to issue marriage licences for minors. Nine states have no lower age limit.
A push for legal reform is having some success. In recent years at least 27 states have passed laws to limit child marriages. In the past four years Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have all eliminated the exemptions that allow minors to marry.
Yet resistance to such reforms remains, on both the right and the left. In 2017 an attempt to set a minimum marrying age of 18 in California (which has no lower age limit) failed after opposition from advocacy groups including the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union. The same year Chris Christie, then the Republican governor of New Jersey, vetoed a similar bill, saying it did not “comport with the sensibilities and, in some cases, the religious customs, of the people of this state”. More generally, lawmakers have failed to press for reform because the number of marrying minors has fallen dramatically. In 1960, 6.8% of American girls aged 15-17 were married; today less than 1% are.
That is still too many, say campaigners. A study published last year by Unchained At Last, an advocacy group, estimated that 297,000 minors were married in America between 2000 and 2018, and 60,000 of them were under their state’s age of consent (for sex). Patchy state data mean this is almost certainly a big undercount, says Fraidy Reiss, Unchained’s executive director. Most minors who marry are girls, she says, and the practice occurs across all ethnic groups and religions. Many of the marriages are prompted by religious beliefs or are immigration-related. Federal immigration law does not specify a minimum age for marriage-related visa petitions.
Escaping from a legal child marriage is difficult. Domestic-violence shelters tend not to accept lone children, who are considered runaways; the police may try to send them back home. Securing a divorce is also tricky. Few lawyers will take on child clients , even if the child has the means to pay them. April says she called dozens of lawyers before she found one who was so appalled by her plight that she drew up a simple divorce contract for no fee.
The State Department’s “Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls”, launched in 2016, described marriage before the age of 18 as a human-rights abuse. But within America, girls who marry before 19 are 50% more likely to drop out of high school. “I did my best,” says April, a college graduate who does gig work, including food delivery and some freelance journalism. But she says she often wonders how much better she would done if she had not missed so much school. Divorcing as a minor required emancipation from her parents by the state, making her a legal adult at 16.
She has only just begun to understand, she says, the toll all this has taken. She panics a lot. At 20 she had a daughter and says that “I worry that I would have been able to do better for her too, though she is doing better than I ever did.” Having lived in or near her home town for several years after her divorce, she decided to move far away after her ex-husband saw her with her daughter, with whom she now lives in Texas. “I wanted to make sure he never set eyes on her ever again,” she says. ■
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