There’s no romance in being a child bride. And whether the “groom” is R. Kelly, with his marriage to 15-year-old Aaliyah, your great-grandmother, or Justine (name changed for protection)—a minor married to a man twice her age in the state of Maryland—more often than not, these marriages are a form of child abuse … government-sanctioned child abuse, in some states.
Child marriage remains legal in well over half of all U.S. states, with over 300,000 minors married between 2000 and 2018. Every year, hundreds of children of every gender, ethnicity and religious background are married, with no regard for their consent. “Groom” might be the technical term in these marriages, but “grooming” is more accurate.
I’ll never forget Ana, the high school student who desperately wanted to find help to avoid the threat of a forced marriage she was facing. She only had a few minutes to use a friend’s phone between classes, because she had no other way to communicate safely and confidentially. Our call ended abruptly, when a school official told her to get off the phone; I never heard from her again. To this day, I am haunted by the thought that she may have never gotten the help she so obviously needed and deserved.
This is so fucked.
A man I know married his 16 year old daughter off to a boy of 18 so he could get out of paying child support and circumvent a custody ruling that had gone against him. He totally pimped out his own daughter.
You know a guy who is a complete piece of shit.
I want to offer another perspective.
I knew someone who got married at 16. The groom was 18, they both came from religious families, and they ended up divorcing at like 22, which was basically a few months after they moved to a liberal area on the west coast.
I don’t think any sane person would call this grooming. At no point was I given the impression that the husband in this situation was abusive. However the situation was fundamentally fucked in a way that was unfair for both parties. My friend felt pressured to be a homemaker while still in high school, while her ex felt even more pressure to be a provider despite having no real emotional or financial capacity for doing so. They also both tried to make it work much longer than they should have, which inflicted a further set of scars.
We live in a world fundamentally more complex than what the average person had to experience 100 years ago. We don’t let teenagers do things like buy alcohol or smoke cigarettes. It is almost expected that 18 - 21 year olds in the US will be on some major level dependent on their parents.
Even in cases where there isn’t abuse, we shouldn’t be letting minors get married. It is just an unfair position to put both parties in.
There was still grooming and still abuse. It was just done by the church.
I get what you’re saying but instilling fucked up religious values in a kid is a completely different thing than marrying off a sixteen year old to a middle aged man.
I listen to a podcast by a licensed therapist (Dr Laura Anderson, Sunday School Dropouts) who specializes in helping people recover from religious trauma, and honestly, she does argue that high control religion works a lot like the dynamics of abusive personal relationships. She also notes that when people are used to being shamed/coerced/guilted/etc for religious reasons, they’re more likely to accept abusive behaviors in personal relationships as well–it’s already normal stuff. And most of the arguments I’ve heard in favor of preserving child marriages comes from religious folks asking “what happens when a 15 year old gets pregnant, the baby needs both a father and a mother!” Instead of wanting to use investigation or nuance, child marriages are a quick fix to always complicated situations.
It’s not nearly as different as you seem to think.
Yes, there are different types of grooming and there are different types of abuse.
It is still grooming and still abuse.
I’m surprised it doesn’t mention the fact that in a lot of states where child marriage is legal, it’s very difficult for those children to get a divorce no matter how badly they want one. They’re generally not allowed to petition for one themselves because, get this, minors are not considered old enough to do so.
On top of that:
One dominant reason that advocates are concerned with married minors having access to divorce is because data shows that child marriage leads to higher risk of domestic violence. If a minor enters a marriage and there’s abuse, any hurdle to exiting that marriage has the potential to prolong the abuse, which, Berg says, doesn’t mean as much to the courts as you might think. Unfortunately, she says many states are no-fault divorce states and don’t recognize domestic violence as grounds for divorce.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/child-marriage-and-divorce-in-the-united-states
With Project 2025 they also want to end no-fault divorce for everyone.
A 2004 paper by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolvers found an 8 to 16% decrease in female suicides after states enacted no-fault divorce laws. They also noted a roughly 30% decrease in intimate partner violence among both women and men, and a 10% drop in women murdered by their partners.
Just looking at the stats you can see why they oppose it.
10% drop in women murdered by their partners
You emphasized this as if this were a bad thing.
Going to add that there are only 13 states where underage marriage is actually banned, and that all of those bans are fairly recent.
Delaware (2018), New Jersey (2018), Pennsylvania (2020), Minnesota (2020), Rhode Island (2021), New York (2021), Massachusetts (2022), Vermont (2023), Connecticut (2023), Michigan (2023), Washington (2024), Virginia (2024) and New Hampshire (2024)
Yeah but then so many republicans would never find wives!!! Think of the republicans!!
Like that creep that married the lady the day she turned 18 when they had been working together since she was 14 or 15. No 45-year-old has anything in common with a teenager.
Yes. Seriously, those who believe that society exists to entrench power overwhelmingly think men > children, and that this dominion extends naturally, and that law is a servant of that natural dominion.
Yep, it needs to change. From Wikipedia
