I was tossed around from home to home and, at the quickest opportunity, married off,” said Tyree, now 46. You’ll be brought back to his house,” said Fairbanks, now 40. “Your husband can report you as a runaway because you’re under 18. She gave birth to eight children as her efforts to leave were stumped by having no money and nowhere to go. But if anyone asked me what I really wanted, I didn’t want that. “People saw it as consent because I wasn’t kicking and screaming. “That was the only choice presented to me,” she said. Raised in a strict evangelical family, Fairbanks was groomed to marry young and at 16 wed a man 10 years her senior. Rates of underage marriage are high in southern, rural states with a high prevalence of poverty and religious conservatism, as well as among Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Sikhs and Hmongs, says campaign group Unchained At Last. Current Ohio law lets 16-year-old girls marry but with an array of exceptions allowing younger children to marry as well.Ĭhild marriage survivors often say they were forced to marry against their will, particularly if they were pregnant to avoid the stigma of giving birth outside wedlock. Lawmakers in the midwestern state of Ohio also are weighing reform so that 17-year-olds would need court approval to marry. Under current law, children ages 16 and 17 need parental consent and those under 16 need judicial consent as well. In Pennsylvania, lawmakers may raise the age of marriage to 18. states do not lay out a minimum age for marriage if statutory exceptions are met, such as parental or judicial consent or in case of pregnancy.īut at least 20 state legislatures are likely to weigh reforms next year, experts say.
Globally 12 million girls marry before age 18 every year, says Girls Not Brides, a coalition working to end child marriage which the United Nations regards as a human rights violation.Ĭampaigners say children married young are more likely to leave school, get divorced, experience domestic abuse and mental health problems and live in poverty than those who marry later.
“I don’t understand how other countries comprehend that it’s wrong, but in our country somehow it’s right,” former child bride Sonora Fairbanks told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. state until this year when the Atlantic coast states of New Jersey and Delaware enacted blanket prohibitions of marriage before age 18. laws permit the legal rape of thousands of teenage girls every year, survivors of child marriage say, but momentum is growing to end underage marriage in more than a dozen states.Ĭhild marriage, more commonly associated with developing countries, was permitted in every U.S.
NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - U.S.
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