Child Wedlock is a Nightmare that Must be Ended in the U.S. and Around the World

The United States has long protested against child marriage abroad, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. But we need to do better listening to ourselves and realizing what is happening in our own country. The shocking plight of a child bride as young as 14 forced to marry her 74-year-old attacker happened here, in Alabama, not some other far off country.

And Alabama is not alone. Shockingly, child marriage is now legal in 43 of the 50 states, according to the website Equality Now. Girls as young as the age of ten are married quite legally in the U.S., leaving them exposed to the menacing actions of an adult.

The anti-child marriage advocacy group Unchained At Last in one study discovered that more than 167,000 children – almost all girls and some as young as 12 – were married from 2000 to 2010, mostly to men 18 or older. The problem doesn’t seem to be improving. According to an article published in The New York Times last June, another study found nearly 300,000 children aged 17 and under were married in the United States from 2000 to 2018. More than 1,000 of the children were 14 or younger, and five were only 10 years old - about the age of a 4th or 5th grader. Never mind that most girls that young have not even reached puberty, they are not that far removed from learning to ride a two-wheeled bicycle.

In fact, the U.S. Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls report, released by the State Department in 2017, rightly calls marriage before 18 years old 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.”

Child marriage leaves girls isolated and at risk of domestic abuse and sexual violence, as their educational and economic opportunities are sharply curtailed.

Despite these abuses, some state legislatures have resisted outlawing child marriage, arguing against all reason that doing so would violate the child’s “right’’ to practice their religion or that marriage is the best way to prevent abortions. 

As a 15-year-old 9h grader, it is unimaginable to me that under different circumstances I could be swept up into a nightmare that too many of my fellow girls are suffering now right here in America. 

As President Barack Obama said in Kenya in 2015, “There’s no place in civilized society for the early or forced marriage of children. ... These are issues of right and wrong — in any culture.’’

It is past time for the United States to begin listening to itself and be the global leader it must be to end this abominable practice.