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Forty children are married each day – the statistic comes not from India, but from the USA. There is no federal law that bans child marriage.
More than 3,00,000 minors have been legally wed in the last two decades, some as young as 10 years. A majority of these – 86 percent – were girls wed to adult men, glaringly older in many cases.
Child marriage is legal in 44 of the 50 US states. Only six states have enacted laws to set the minimum marriage age at 18 years, that too in the last three years.
In 2018, Delaware and New Jersey became the first states to end child marriage, followed by Minnesota and Pennsylvania in 2020, and New York and Rhode Island in 2021.
Unchained at Last, whose unconventional bridal gown chain-in protests became eye-catching and Tahirih Justice Center, led the lobbying. Tahirih Justice Center is a non-profit that works for immigrants fleeing gender-based violence, and refers to the recent tide as a national movement to ban child marriage.
Just at eight years, Naila was engaged to an older cousin during a family visit to Pakistan and forced to wed when she was only 13. Her then husband’s US visa was based on the marriage. Beaten and raped, eventually Naila fled into foster care. She founded The Naila Amin Foundation.
Another survivor and activist Sasha Taylor left a long career as an analyst with FBI to influence legislators and media.
“News about girls from Afghanistan being forced into marriages on the tarmac made me cry. It’s going to happen all over again if we do not change laws,” said Sasha, who became a visa bride at the age of 15.
Raised in Karachi by a grandmother who was from Ajmer, Sasha joined her parents in US when she was eight. A few years on, teenager Sasha returned from school one day to be quickly put into salwar-kameez and engaged to a stranger.
She now wants to plug the loophole that lets families marry their US citizen minors for visa sponsorships.
Forced to Marry Him: A Lifetime of Tradition and the Will to Break It’ is Davinder Kaur’s story in a book. She immigrated to the US after escaping her forced marriage in the UK.
The author recalls, “He was drunk. He attacked and raped me. He was strangling me. My dad said – your husband has every right to do that.” The teenage bride ran away that night from both men. At her book readings, Davinder finds women reaching out to her, “Forced and child marriages are not uncommon among desi diaspora. They are very hush-hush about it. When I speak at public events, women come up to me to share,” says Davinder.
Child marriages are not confined to immigrant communities in the richest nation.
“We have helped survivors and rescued victims from every background – a lot from families in the US for many generations, Americans whose origins lie not only in Asia and Africa, but also Europe, Canada, South America. We have helped Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus,” says Fraidy Reiss, a survivor herself.
“I was forced to marry in an ultra-orthodox Jewish community. I grew up in a very fundamentalist Jewish, ultra-insular, extremely religious community in New Jersey. In fundamentalist fringes of major religions, forced and child marriage are very common,” she adds.
Permissible age for marriage in the US is governed by state laws – a baffling array. States have set different minimum age ranging from 0 to 19 years. Nine states continue to have no minimum age limit, including California, Massachusetts, and Washington. Legal age of consent for sex is higher than legal minimum age for marriage in these states. In others with age limits, minors as young as 12 years can marry with parental and/or judicial consent. Judges have no legal basis for saying no.
Activists run into legal road blocks.
Aditi researched social and mental health effects of child marriage in the US, as part of her Masters at University of Southern California. Minors have limited legal rights, most domestic violence shelters don’t accept them and most states forbid them from filing for divorce without parental approval, making it nearly impossible for children who experience marital violence to get help, or even run away.
Tahirih Justice Center research shows that child marriage happens for a variety of reasons, including cover-ups for rape. Some state prosecutors do not convict a man for rape if the man marries the girl.
Proponents of raising the marriage age have started a national movement to persuade Americans that child marriages are not always about high school romance. Bills have been introduced in dozens of state legislatures. Increasing media coverage has brought focus on child brides trapped in violent relationships, that keep them undereducated, poor, and unhealthy. Moreover, 80 percent of such marriages end in divorce.
Former child brides want legislators to grasp that raising minimum marriage age in only a few states creates child marriage havens in other states. It is a national problem in the US – it needs a nationwide ban.
(Savita Patel is a senior journalist and producer, who produced ‘Worldview India’, a weekly international affairs show, and produced ‘Across Seven Seas’, a diaspora show, both with World Report, aired on DD. She has also covered stories for Voice of America TV from California. She’s currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She tweets @SsavitaPatel.)
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