We Are Not Down with the Sickness
Child marriage is still legal in 41 states
I cannot tell you how disturbing it is to hear of children being forced into marriages against their will. Elizabeth Vargas has a documentary on Hulu, I Was a Child Bride.
One word: Ghastly.
The United States has a perversion that runs deep and has gone on long enough. In 2023, we even have politicians in office who want to legalize grown men marrying underage girls. These marriages come with the stipulation that parents must sign consent forms.
What parent could possibly be okay with the idea of their adolescent child being married off to an older man?
In case anyone has forgotten, it’s 2023, not 1023. The very idea that people are in favor of 10, 12, 14, or 15 year olds marrying anyone is beyond disgusting. We should have rid ourselves of this practice by now. Let’s go to the scientific literature to establish what exactly we are talking about.
MRI studies of Brain Development
Teenagers are not adults, even if they sometimes look like them.
According to “Maturation of the Adolescent Brain,” longitudinal MRI studies show the adolescent brain goes through a rewriting process after puberty that varies between boys and girls, but extends to age twenty-five for both genders.
(For the sake of argument, we’ll look at gender as a binary in this piece.)
In the meantime, teenagers make mistakes. Big ones.
Nineteen million adolescents (fifteen to twenty-four years) in the US were diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in the years leading up to this 2013 study. 39% admitted to having unprotected sex. 12% of adolescents committed suicide and 15% were victims of homicide. 30% of adolescents had been in motor vehicle accidents, with 41% of these linked to death.
Cellphone use while driving certainly hasn’t helped. Ever wonder why insurance rates for eighteen year olds are so sky high the first five years of driving and then slowly drop down year after year? It’s because of their immature brains.
I’m to the point where I am more than okay with raising the age of consent to 24–25
And these two studies, came to the conclusion that male and female brains finish developing around twenty-four to twenty-five years of age.
So now what?
After browsing multiple studies, I’m to the point where I am more than okay with raising the age of consent to 24–25. Of course, this would not make me very popular among that demographic.
41 States Still Allow Children to Wed
What’s wrong with this picture? This should be across the board. What we are seeing is a glacier pace of reform. That still leaves 41 states where it’s still legal. WTF, America?!?
From 2000–2018 nearly 300,000 people including children as young as ten were allowed to be married. Most of these marriages were young girls to adult men. As if we needed any justification to end this horrific practice, here are some frightening circumstances to consider.
1. Child marriage can easily turn into forced marriage
Children who marry adults need a guardian to initiate any legal proceedings. Imagine if the child were in an extra abusive marriage (being married to an adult is already abusive) and needed to secure council for legal advice, how would they be able to accomplish this? The child would need a guardian to oversee the entire procedure and that’s assuming that the child had any understanding or grasp of their predicament and their options to handle it.
Imagine if the child needed to petition for a protective order. Are you beginning to see what a trap this is? Talk about putting the “lock” on “wedlock.”
2. Child marriage destroys children’s lives
Setting the loss of economic opportunities aside, this horrific practice destroys children’s health and education. Individuals who married before 18 report high rates of abuse including sexual, physical and emotional abuse during the marriage not to mention all of the unplanned pregnancies.
Another startling fact is that marriages before age 18 have a 70–80% divorce rate which leaves the single teen mother to suffer economic deprivation and instability.
3. Child marriage undermines statutory rape laws
We’ve heard the stories in the news where adult teachers carry on illicit sexual relationships with a student, or a youth pastor or pastor of a church sexually abuses an underage child. Even if it was consensual (children cannot legally consent) these would still be examples of statutory rape. Now, let’s change the scenario and now the teacher/pastor/preacher is legally married to the child. This basically undermines the laws meant to keep children safe from these predators. We have basically handed a rapist a “get out jail” free card in the form of a marriage license.
Ignorance is bliss
What is sad is how few Americans even know that this practice is even going on. Multiple polls show that many Americans either believe that this practice is already illegal or that it is legal in only a few as four states. It still goes on in 41 states with varying degrees of severity of abuse.
On the decline? Not really.
I would love to say that this was due to the United States maturing and our understanding of the plight of children increasing but that would only be wishful thinking on my part. We can’t even get common sense gun laws passed to keep firearms out of the hands of domestic abusers and the severely mentally ill to keep kids from getting shot up in our schools, so this should come as no surprise.
Thankfully, child marriage has been on the decline, but ironically it seems to coincide with marriage rates in total also being on the decline.
Blast it to the past
So let’s start putting specific states on blast. It’s time we looked inward. Children as young as 12 were abused by the state by being granted marriage licenses in Alaska, Louisiana, and South Carolina between 2000–2018. And 13 year olds were abused by the state in Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington by being granted marriage licenses.
Just reading through the statistics and looking at metrics and graphs detailing the legal abuse of children made my stomach churn. I hope it had the same affect on you.
- Minors marrying other minors made up 14% of all child marriages whereas minors marrying adults made up 86%
- Minors marrying adults 18–20 years old: 60%
- Minors marrying adults 21–23 years of age: 25%
- Minors marrying adults 24–26 years of age: 9%
I think I’m going to be sick.
- Minors marrying adults 27–29 years of age: 3%
- Minors marrying adults older than 29 years of age: 3%
It’s quite clear that we have a major child abuse problem on our hands. How in Hell can we claim to care for children if we cannot do the bare minimum? We claim to be against child abuse and rape but then we turn around and issue a license to their rapist which allows for the child to be abused and exploited.
Do we care about children?
We must prove it through policy.
Thank you for reading my article. If you liked what you read please consider giving me a follow and if you would like me to write about a certain topic of interest, send a message.
For further reading:
Girls’ Brains Mature Faster Than Boys’: Fact or Fiction? at The Hiller Newspaper
Sex Differences in the Adolescent Brain, at the National Institutes of Health
The Fight Continues to End Child Marriage in the U.S., at Unicef
Child Marriage in America by the Numbers, by Frontline, and
About Child Marriage in the U.S., at Unchained at Last.
Check out I Was a Child Bride: The Untold Story on Hulu!
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