Evaluating and Improving Child Marriage Policy in the U.S.

August 10, 2021

by Sarah Cheney

Introduction

In this written work there will be a discussion of the magnitude and harmful effects of child marriage on youth, especially girls, in the United States. There will be a discussion of the lasting effects child marriage can have on the mental, physical, and socioeconomic wellbeing of girls in the United States. There will be a discussion of how Child Marriage Policy in the U.S. is not sufficient in protecting children. In this written work, there will be a piece of hypothetical legislation introduced to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee – Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice. There will be a discussion of the history of child marriage in the U.S. and previous legislation that has been developed/backed by the U.S. regarding child marriage. Furthermore, there will be a discussion of the problems associated with child marriage. Finally, the type of change/recommendations to be argued for in the new legislation to be presented would be: (1) To raise the state mandated age of marriage to the state mandated “age of consent” with protections set in place for minors who report abuse (2) To mandate collecting data on child marriages.

Issue & History

As the U.S. does not enforce collection of data on child marriage, much of the history of child marriage in the U.S. comes from the memoirs and stories told by child marriage survivors. One such of these marriages occurred as early as the 1800s where an 11 year old girl, Francesca Carboni, who came from a family of Italian immigrants, was forced to marry a man in his 20’s. After beating her for much of their marriage, she was able to escape. The Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty of Children is the main reason her picture exists and her story is told. Unfortunately, there are many similarities between Francesca Carboni’s story and those of many child marriage survivors today. As recent as 2004, Liset Rodriguez dated a boy four years older than her and when Texas threatened statutory rape, she was married despite the state ‘s mandated age of 16 as the minimum marriageable age. Stories like Francesca’s and Liset’s demonstrate that child marriage is something that the United States has not grown out of and deserves to be frowned upon and punished rightfully so.

In the United States, Child Marriage Policy still has many improvement to be made in its ability to truly protect the lives of children. The exact number of child marriages in the U.S. per year are difficult to determine, however, it is estimated that about 248,000 children were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010 (Selby, 2019). Most of these children were girls, some of which were as young as 12. About 77% of these girls were married to adult men. As of May 2021, there are only 4 states which completely ban underage marriages – Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey (Chau, 2020). Furthermore, there is evidence that female victims of child marriage often live in poverty, hold jobs less frequently, and retain less human capital. Child marriages minimize their ability to attain economic resources and leave their oppressors (Das, 2018) Additionally, they have less decision-making and bargaining power in their respective communities or households which directly leads to higher risks of domestic and intimate partner abuse. These negative effects that child marriage have on its victims span beyond their marriages. Even when the victim is able to be divorced or leaves the relationship, the lasting economics impacts of child marriage, such as not graduating high school or not having any job experience, can keep them in poverty and decrease their accessibility to brighter futures. It is the United State’s responsibility to protect these victims from being exploited, oftentimes, by their friends, partners, and families.

Policy Background

In discussing previous legislation, the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice will be able to see how America’s distant past unfortunately has persisted into the present. As of May 2021, there are only two major pieces of legislation which seek to address the atrocities of child marriage. Even so, one of these pieces of legislation directed by the U.S. focuses on child marriage outside of the U.S. This piece of legislation is known as “Preventing Child Marriage in Displaced Populations Act”. It directs the President to push for the United Nations to develop a comprehensive strategy to address the prevalence of child marriage among refugee settlements (Congressional Research Service, 2019-2020). It mandates collecting and reporting data on child marriages, protocols for preventing these child marriages, and setting programs in place to support victims of these marriages. Another piece of legislation that seeks to address child marriages (in the U.S. this time) is the “Child Marriage Prevention Act”. This bill declared that states are not required to recognize a marriage in another state if one or both individuals are not at least 18 years old. However, both state and federal law must recognize a marriage if it was approved by a judge in a proceeding where the minor was represented by independent counsel (Congressional Research Service, 2017-2018). Both pieces of legislation are related to the recommendations to be made further on in this academic work. This is because the United States’ Child Marriage Policy is still a young field of study and implementation. These are the only pieces of legislation that can be used as foundational material to future policies that can better protect victims of child marriage.

Problems

There are two problems associated with the “Preventing Child Marriage in Displaced Populations Act” and the “Child Marriage Prevention Act”. A problem associated with the “Preventing Child Marriage in Displaced Populations Act” is that although it is a U.S. pushed piece of legislation, it does nothing to actually target the prevalence of child marriage in the U.S. and the problems associated with it. All it can be is a foundational piece of legislation that can influence the creation of future policy that is focused on domestic child marriage problems. Furthermore, this bill was introduced to the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Relations. Directing this bill to that committee does more damage in that it shows that the U.S. is prioritizing focusing on the international issue of child marriage in a way that labels it as only an issue in “third-world countries”. This sends a message that the U.S. is willing to hold other countries accountable for their human rights abuses but not hold themselves accountable too the same degree. It also further stigmatizes immigrant communities and populations. For this reason, the hypothetical bill to be presented, would be presented to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee-Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice. This would focus the message of the legislation to be directed forward as a domestic issue. This would also send the message that this legislation is focused on holding the U.S. accountable on outdated policies which harm both women [girls] and children.

         Additionally, a problem associated with the “Child Marriage Prevention Act” is that there are still loopholes in place according to state and federal laws that allow minors to become victims of child marriage if they are represented by independent council (i.e. parents/guardians). This allows some states to continue to not have age minimums to child marriage and enables parents to subject their children to child marriages. For this reason, there should be policies in place that require age minimums that cannot be taken advantage of, if and especially if the child is being physically, emotionally, and/or sexually abused. As mentioned before, there are cases where children have been forced to marry individuals because of rape charges. There are unfortunately also cases where girls are forced to marry adult men because they were pregnant. Because of these cases, there should be policies pushed forward where children have the ability to report to police and have their cases taken seriously. There is already a stigma associated with domestic abuse against women. Child marriage laws should not make reporting these abuses any harder.

Furthermore, there are major issues associated with the fact that most information that is available to the general public as well as academics regarding child marriages is only approximated. The United States does not enforce data collection on child marriages in the United States. Much of the data available is found through officially published NGO’s such as the Tahirih Justice Center. Other organizations, such as the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), have identified ways to keep track of child marriages by state through the use of marriage licenses. The ICRW has also utilized the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) which includes interviewing boys and girls as young as 15 about their marital status. Unfortunately, even interviewing children as young as 15 leaves out many victims of child marriage. In order to push forward policy that can effectively address the issues the U.S. has with child marriages, the U.S. must be able to quantitatively track and address the issues it has with child marriage through data collection. Because this data collection is not in place at all, the easiest way to improve it would be to start collecting it in the first place. An argument for instating data collection is that the DOJ currently has taken on previous cases which exemplify their dedication to protecting children against violence, however, it seems awfully strange to be so dedicated to protecting children against predators but not protecting them against child marriages that force them to marry those predators. Furthermore, the Department of Justice models their programs strongly off of the FBI’s in regards to tracking rates of online predators. This would indicate that they have the capacity to take on child marriage issues and data collection considering they dedicate so much of their time and energy to protecting children.

Recommendations

Moving forward off of the legislation that has been discussed, there are two recommendations to be made: (1) To raise the state mandated age of marriage to the state mandated “age of consent” with protections set in place for minors who report abuse (2) To mandate collecting and reporting data on child marriages, protocols for preventing these child marriages, and setting programs in place to support victims of these marriages.

The first recommendation is made with the fact in mind that many states do not have minimum age requirements for child marriages and setting the marriage age requirement to the “age of consent” would help eliminate some of the loopholes currently present. For example, the loopholes in which children are allowed to marry adults if they are pregnant or facing statutory rape charges would become more clear cases. The child would be able to report abuse if they were younger than the “age of consent”. In order too fully eliminate these loopholes, there would be an attachment clause on no exceptions to the minimum age of each state being on or above the age of consent for any cases in regard to child marriage, including pregnancy, statutory rape cases, or even cases with parental approval.  Additionally, there should be safety measures set into place in the cases in which children do report abuse to police where they are given protection against family or their abusers, especially if it is in relation to preventing circumstances in which child marriage is weaponized. Some of the safety measures to be put into place would mirror those involved in cases of domestic violence such as no contact orders. The response to these cases would be modeled off of the state’s response to child abuse and neglect Cases in which children’s cases would be investigated and children would be removed from the household or situation while the investigation takes place (so that they are not in active danger)14.

The second recommendation would be set into place in order to allow the U.S. and federal/state analysts to have a true understanding of the amounts of child marriage happening in different states in the United States every year. There is already a general understanding of child marriages over time that is alarming enough to gain national attention, however, actually mandating reporting and data collection could allow more attention to be brought to the issue for the U.S. to view child marriages to be just as much of a domestic issue as an international one. This reporting would be implemented through the Department of Justice since they run programs in the Department of Justice regarding tracking crimes against children and pedophilia. Furthermore, implementing an age minimum for child marriages would make it easier to target the ages in which data collection should target (for surveys, marriage licenses, or otherwise).

To summarize, this bill would specifically implement the age restrictions set in place to raise the age minimum for child marriage to the “age of consent” and set safety measures into place modeled off of domestic violence and child abuse and neglect circumstances. Furthermore, there would be a federal mandate to require data collection on child marriages through the Department of Justice because of the DOJ’s history with collecting data on violence against children and pedophilia.

Conclusion

In this written work, there was a hypothetical bill proposed to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee – Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice. There was a discussion of the issues associated with child marriages and the history of child marriage in the United States. There was also a discussion of the previous bills introduced to Congress regarding child marriage. The problems associated with previous legislation were discussed and arguments were pushed forward as to why these issues should be resolved. Finally, there were recommendations made to: (1) To raise the state mandated age of marriage to the state mandated “age of consent” with protections set in place for minors who report abuse (2) To mandate collecting data on child marriages.

References

1.     Dukakis, A. (2019, June 30). Child Marriage, Common In The Past, Persists Today. Colorado Public Radio. https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/child-marriage-common-in-the-past-persists-today/.

2.     “Teen Marriage Continues in Rural America.” University of North Carolina Press, 2016, pp. 252–266. JSTOR, www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/stable/10.5149/9781469629544_syrett.14. Accessed 3 May 2021.

  1. Selby, D. (2019, September 3). Child Marriage Is Legal in the US. Here’s How You Can Help End It. Global Citizen. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/child-marriage-in-the-us-what-to-know/.
  2. Chau, N. B. (2020, July 1). Child marriage is “extremely prevalent” in U.S.: “The cycle perpetuates across generations”. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/child-marriage-united-states-donna-pollard/#:~:text=There%20are%20only%20four%20states,that%20completely%20ban%20underage%20marriages.&text=And%20in%20a%20case%20where,no%20minimum%20age%20for%20marriage.

5.     Syrett, N. (2016). American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Retrieved May 3, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469629544_syrett

  1. Aditi Wahi, Kristen L. Zaleski, Jacob Lampe, Patricia Bevan & Alissa Koski (2019) The Lived Experience of Child Marriage in the United States, Social Work in Public Health, 34:3, 201-213, DOI: 10.1080/19371918.2019.1575312
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10.  Kim. (2020, October 30). Child Marriage Isn’t Us vs Them – It’s an Us Problem Too. National Organization for Women. https://now.org/blog/child-marriage-isnt-us-vs-them-its-an-us-problem-too/.

11.  Valencia, M. (2020, December 27). ‘Trapped’: The American women and girls forced into marriage. Child Rights News | Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/12/24/america-women-and-girls-forced-into-marriage.

12.  Malhotra, A. (2011). Solutions to End Child Marriage. International Center for Research on Women . https://www.healthynewbornnetwork.org/hnn-content/uploads/Solutions-to-End-Child-Marriage1.pdf.

13.  Tahirih Justice Center. (2020, May). A Report on the Movement to End Child Marriage in America. Tahirih Justice Center. https://1ttls613brjl37btxk4eg60v-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Reflection-Paper_Making-Progress-But-Still-Falling-Short_FINAL-with-map_May-13_2020.pdf.

14.  Child Protective Services. The Child Welfare Challenge. (2017, July 12). https://search.proquest.com/openview/92fa34ef398726d9b7bb4931b4e3bf38/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=40853.

15.  Vill, R. L. (2007, March 8). The Third Circuit Takes a Hard Line against Child Predators in United States v. Tykarsky. HeinOnline. https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals%2Fvllalr52&div=43&id=&page=.16.  Wolak, J. (2009). Trends in Arrests of Online Predators. University of New Hampshire Scholars Repository. https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1051&context=ccrc.