Advocates are fighting to outlaw adult marriages to minors
The statistics are alarming. Teens who marry are 50 percent more likely to drop out of high school; they are also more likely to live in poverty later in life. They have substantially higher rates of psychiatric disorders; they are much more likely to have a stroke, heart disease and diabetes. In terms of intimate partner violence, young women ages 16 to 19 face victimization almost triple the national average.
Girls under 18 also might find life difficult if they choose to flee a marriage. Most domestic violence shelters don’t accept minors. Those that do can notify parents. Although automatically emancipated by marriage, a minor’s right to sign a legal contract can be restricted, creating all sorts of difficulties.
Donna Pollard, an opponent of child marriage from Kentucky, met her future husband at 14 when her mother sent her to a behavioral health facility where the man, 29, worked. They married two years later. “It should not have been a wedding,” she testified at a teleconference sponsored by Tahirih in August. “It was statutory rape.”
The high school near her new home rejected her because she was deemed likely to get pregnant. Pollard lost custody of her infant girl because she lacked legal representation. Fleeing the marriage, she couldn’t get into an apartment complex because she was too young to sign a lease. Now in her early 30s with the years of abuse in the rearview mirror, Pollard said simply: “He preyed on my vulnerability.”
A HODEGPODGE OF LAWS
The challenge of changing minimum-age marriage laws is made more daunting by the complexity of the many different laws. More than half of all states do not specify a minimum “floor” age below which children cannot marry, according to Tahirih.
Some states allow parental consent as an exception to an under-18 marriage. Others, the majority, permit a judge to emancipate a young person. A number of states permit a pregnant teenager to marry with or without consent. The support for child marriage and objections to change are almost as varied and not always predictable.
The National Right to Life movement opposes restrictions on the grounds that they might make pregnant teens more likely to have an abortion. The American Civil Liberties Union—in a recent California action—opposed blanket restrictions because they intrude on “the fundamental rights of marriage.” The Children’s Law Center of California argued that raising the marriage age would strip minors of their chance to escape foster care through emancipation. In New Jersey, outgoing Gov. Chris Christie issued a conditional veto to a near-unanimous bill that would have raised the minimum age to 18, proposing a 16-year-old floor and citing his state’s religious traditions.
Christie’s proposal would have required a judge’s consent for 16- and 17-year-olds to marry.
“His veto indicates a troubling lack of understanding of how forced marriages often play out,” Smoot says. “Judges in New Jersey and others have approved the marriages of girls at young ages and with large age differences that should have been clear red flags that the girl was at risk.” Those girls, she says, should have been protected and “not shuffled down the aisle.”
Smoot’s language hints at another challenge for those who seek change—namely the conflation of “child marriage” with “forced marriage.” She says they aren’t synonymous, and they are two separate if overlapping issues. The overlap, of course, is that many girls and young women who marry are, in effect, coerced into marriage by parents or much older men. The outcome might not vary much if the girl were technically forced.
“Regardless of whether the union was the child’s or the parent’s idea, marriage before 18 has catastrophic, lifelong effects on a girl, undermining her health, education and economic opportunities while increasing her risk of experiencing violence,” wrote Fraidy Reiss, founder of Unchained at Last, in an op-ed for the Washington Post.
Tahirih has 10 states in its crosshairs, hoping to end child marriage in upcoming legislative sessions. Another priority is improving the education of judges, who might not always be qualified to determine whether a young woman has been forced or coerced. Judges don’t see “threats that a girl might be facing outside the courtroom,” Smoot says.
Tahirih also picked up a major ally in 2014, when the ABA House of Delegates issued a detailed resolution that condemned forced marriage. More allies exist in the hundreds of law firms that, like Hogan Lovells, have contributed thousands of pro bono hours in research and legal advice.
“Without their help, none of this would be possible,” Smoot says.
Correction
“Marital Discord,” January, should have stated that the Tahirih Justice Center estimates more than 14 million girls under age 18 will marry each year during the next decade. Also, the story should have reported that teens who marry are 50 percent more likely to drop out of high school; they are also more likely to live in poverty later in life.The Journal regrets the errors.
This article was published in the January 2018 issue of the ABA Journal with the title "Marital Discord: Advocates are fighting to outlaw adult marriages to minors."
