Child Marriage in America: Infuriating but Unsolvable
Hidden beneath the world’s attention, America, chanting for human rights and freedoms, has long had a brutal and unhumane problem of child marriage. As of October 2021, 44 of the 50 U.S. states allow children to marry with parental consent, and the minimum age varies across the country. According to groundbreaking research by Unchained, between 2000 and 2018, nearly 300,000 children as young as 10 married in the U.S.—most of them girls married to grown men. Child marriage deprives girls of education and contributes to poverty, and in the absence of protective federal laws, more than 20 states allow child marriages as young as 16, and 10 of them do not have any age restrictions. Population investigator Florence Blondel uncovers an ugly and little-known truth. According to World Population Review, in most states in the United States, the minimum age of marriage for minors with parental consent is 12 to 17 years old. California and Mississippi do not set a minimum age for minors to marry with parental consent. Massachusetts has the lowest minimum age for marriage at 12 for girls and 14 for boys.
In the United States, women who were married before age 19 were 50 percent more likely than unmarried women to drop out of high school and four times less likely to complete college. Young women who marry in their teens often lack access to education and jobs, in part because they tend to conceive earlier, with more closely spaced pregnancies and more children. Pregnant teenage girls face a significantly increased risk of forced marriage, according to research by Unchained. Sometimes it’s because adults in their lives are determined to cover up statutory or forced rape, and often because adults mistakenly believe that marriage is somehow beneficial to pregnant teenage girls. This has made the environment for children in the United States worse, especially after the global pandemic of COVID-19.
State condones child rape
A new report from research group Unchained states that child marriage often masks child rape and serves as a “get out of jail” card for would-be rapists under state law. Shockingly, in most states, the legal framework that would normally consider statutory rape for sexual relations with a minor does not apply to marriage. In the remaining states, while sex with a minor is illegal in all circumstances, marriage to a minor is still permitted, and there are no controls or enforcement measures in place once the document is signed. Equally shocking is that federal criminal law prohibits sex with children between the ages of 12 and 15, but exempts those who marry the child first. The Unchained report rightly states that this encourages child marriage and implicitly supports child rape.
Ironically, the US remains the only UN member state that has yet to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. “It’s very common in America,” said Donna Pollard, founder of Survivor’s Corner, which supports survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, abuse and exploitation. Pollard, from Kentucky, married a man almost twice her age when she was 16. In February 2021, Pollard called 13 child marriage opponents to testify via Zoom, including five survivors of child marriage from states including California, Texas and Maryland. Child marriage opponents describe their marriages as forced or coerced. “I was 16 when I was forced to marry while living in a cult in California,” one witness testified. An advocate against child marriage argues that judicial review of marriage petitions often fails to stop forced weddings because teens fearful of domestic violence must choose between telling the truth and facing repercussions at home or lying to the courts. Another witness noted that a 2020 UN report found a link between forced marriage and human trafficking. In California, a bill to raise the marriage age to 18 failed in 2017 after opposition from the state chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood. The ACLU argues that the bill unnecessarily and inappropriately violates the fundamental right to marriage without good cause. A compromise law signed in 2018 requires judges to seek evidence of coercion before issuing marriage licenses to minors.
The United States has a well-documented problem with child marriage. A shocking fact is that in most cases of child marriage, adult U.S. citizen men petition for foreign girls and unmarried women. Many of these adult U.S. citizens are in their 40s and 50s. Frankly, U.S. laws promote predatory behavior among U.S. citizens and put girls in the U.S. and abroad at risk of child marriage, fueling the illegal human-trafficking industry.
Rape and sexual abuse occur frequently in the United States
Sexual assault is currently the most common crime in the United States, but it is also the most underrated crime. In the United States, an average of 463,634 victims 12 years of age or older are raped and sexually assaulted each year. More than 40% of women in the United States have experienced sexual violence. Statistics on rape and sexual assault show that sexual abuse affects 41.8 percent of women in the United States who are victims of sexual violence other than rape. Nearly 80 percent of female sexual assault victims experience their first sexual assault before the age of 25.
Female sexual assault statistics reveal some deeply disturbing truths. An estimated 70 women in the United States commit suicide every day as a result of sexual violence. Worryingly, this number is up 2.87% from last year. According to a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1.6 per cent (16 per thousand) of children aged 12-17 are victims of rape or sexual assault. Chronically abused children often develop low self-esteem, feelings of worthlessness, and abnormal or distorted perceptions of sex. Children may become withdrawn and mistrust adults, and may be suicidal.
Additionally, Native Americans face the greatest risk of sexual violence. On average, American Indians aged 12 and older are sexually assaulted 5,900 times a year. American Indians are twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted compared to all races.
In addition, crime within the military is equally appalling. A study on the level of sexual assault within the military in 2010 showed sexual violence statistics at 3,577. The study was repeated in 2019, with sexual assault statistics showing that there have now been more than 19,000 sexual assaults in the U.S. military, and crime rates have soared nearly five-fold.
It may be for the same reason that nearly 80 percent of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported, according to a Department of Justice analysis of violent crimes in 2016. Only about 23 percent of survivors report such crimes to the police, a statistic that sounds incredible, but it’s true. Rape is the easiest violent crime to escape in the United States. On average, less than 1 percent of sexual assaults result in a conviction. This is the tragic fact that American women face every day but cannot change.
