News

I’ll never forget Ana, the high school student who desperately wanted to find help to avoid the threat of a forced marriage she was facing. She only had a few minutes to use a friend’s phone between classes, because she had no other way to communicate safely and confidentially. Our call ended abruptly, when a school official told her to get off the phone; I never heard from her again. To this day, I am haunted by the thought that she may have never gotten the help she so obviously needed and deserved.

This is so fucked.

A man I know married his 16 year old daughter off to a boy of 18 so he could get out of paying child support and circumvent a custody ruling that had gone against him. He totally pimped out his own daughter.

I want to offer another perspective.

I knew someone who got married at 16. The groom was 18, they both came from religious families, and they ended up divorcing at like 22, which was basically a few months after they moved to a liberal area on the west coast.

I don't think any sane person would call this grooming. At no point was I given the impression that the husband in this situation was abusive. However the situation was fundamentally fucked in a way that was unfair for both parties. My friend felt pressured to be a homemaker while still in high school, while her ex felt even more pressure to be a provider despite having no real emotional or financial capacity for doing so. They also both tried to make it work much longer than they should have, which inflicted a further set of scars.

We live in a world fundamentally more complex than what the average person had to experience 100 years ago. We don't let teenagers do things like buy alcohol or smoke cigarettes. It is almost expected that 18 - 21 year olds in the US will be on some major level dependent on their parents.

Even in cases where there isn't abuse, we shouldn't be letting minors get married. It is just an unfair position to put both parties in.

I'm surprised it doesn't mention the fact that in a lot of states where child marriage is legal, it's very difficult for those children to get a divorce no matter how badly they want one. They're generally not allowed to petition for one themselves because, get this, minors are not considered old enough to do so.

On top of that:

One dominant reason that advocates are concerned with married minors having access to divorce is because data shows that child marriage leads to higher risk of domestic violence. If a minor enters a marriage and there’s abuse, any hurdle to exiting that marriage has the potential to prolong the abuse, which, Berg says, doesn’t mean as much to the courts as you might think. Unfortunately, she says many states are no-fault divorce states and don’t recognize domestic violence as grounds for divorce.

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/child-marriage-and-divorce-in-the-united-states

Yeah but then so many republicans would never find wives!!! Think of the republicans!!

Yep, it needs to change. From Wikipedia

For those wondering.