Sen. Durbin must withdraw or amend the Child Marriage Prevention Act. Girls in the U.S. and across the globe are relying on us to keep our promise to end all marriage before age 18, no exceptions.
The world was outraged when Iraq recently introduced a draft law to lower the marriage age for girls to 9.
But a bill introduced much closer to home would lower the marriage age in nearly half the United States. It would legalize the trafficking of minors to the U.S. under the guise of marriage. And it would financially reward states that refuse to ban child marriage.
This federal bill is named the Child Marriage Prevention Act and is intended to combat child marriage—but some provisions in the bill actually would contradict, undermine and obstruct the national and global commitment to end child marriage by the end of the decade.
Child marriage, or marriage before age 18, is a particularly heinous form of forced marriage, which is a form of modern slavery. The U.S. has joined the rest of the world in condemning child marriage as a “harmful practice” and vowing to eliminate it by year 2030 to help achieve gender equality.
Even before Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) introduced the Child Marriage Prevention Act, the U.S. was not on track to keep that promise. Marriage age here is set by each state, so Unchained At Last—the nonprofit organization I founded after I escaped my own forced marriage—leads a national movement to advocate in every state for a marriage age of 18, no exceptions. So far we and our allies have helped to ban child marriage in 13 states, but it remains legal and happening in the remaining 37.
These dangerous, outdated laws explain why more than 300,000 minors have been legally entered into marriage in the U.S. since 2000, mostly girls wed to adult men. At least 60,000 of them were not old enough to consent to sex with their spouse.
While countries as diverse as Sierra Leone, the Philippines and England recently banned child marriage, the United Nations Human Rights Committee declared in 2023 that it is “concerned” that child marriage remains legal in most of the U.S., and it urged “measures at all levels in order to prohibit marriage under the age of 18 years.”
Durbin’s bill would do the opposite.
Instead of setting a minimum age of 18 for spousal visas—one of the basic steps Congress must take to combat child marriage—it would set a minimum age of 16 for minors around the world to receive a spousal visa to the U.S. This would legalize and encourage predators to “save” teens in other countries by marrying them and bringing them to the U.S.
The teens who would suffer would be girls. Some 95 percent of the minors who recently were trafficked to or from the U.S. under the guise of marriage were girls wed to adult men.
“Suffer” is not hyperbole. In the U.S., like around the world, marriage before age 18 destroys girls’ health, education and economic opportunities and their sexual and reproductive rights and physical safety. It creates a nightmarish legal trap: Minors typically cannot leave home, enter a domestic violence shelter, retain an attorney or even file for divorce. Indeed, the U.S. State Department calls child marriage a “human rights abuse.”
Since Durbin’s bill would grant spousal visas only to teens overseas who married an American adult, it would all but ensure that the teens also would suffer from the power imbalance that inevitably exists between a minor immigrant and an adult citizen.
The bill would limit underage spousal visas to “humanitarian” situations “arising from a risk of individualized and targeted harm.” This is not much of a limit. Nearly every girl Unchained has served who was trafficked to the U.S. under the guise of marriage came from a situation that meets this criterion. And the bill would barely improve upon current federal law, which sets no minimum age for spousal or fiancée visa petitioners and beneficiaries, since most of the thousands of minors trafficked recently under the guise of marriage were 16- or 17-year-old girls from overseas wed to a U.S. adult—which would remain legal if the bill passed.
Besides, why end child marriage for everyone except girls in “humanitarian” circumstances? Do American girls deserve the protection of an “18 no exceptions” marriage age, while girls in humanitarian settings should be happy with 16? Are we to believe that a human rights abuse can be humanitarian?
Currently the federal government defers to the relevant state’s marriage age when processing a spousal visa involving a minor. Therefore, the current spousal-visa age is 18 in the 13 states where we have helped to ban child marriage, and the spousal-visa age is 17 in 10 additional states that set a marriage age of 17. Durbin’s bill instead would make 16 the age to receive a spousal visa in every state, which means it would lower the marriage age for immigration purposes in nearly half the U.S.
The bill also would be devastating for girls in the U.S. It would give financial rewards to states that opt not to end child marriage but to study it instead, thus seriously impeding our efforts to convince legislators in 37 more states to eliminate a harmful practice that destroys American girls’ lives.
Sen. Durbin must withdraw or amend the Child Marriage Prevention Act. Girls in the U.S. and across the globe are relying on us to keep our promise to end all marriage before age 18, no exceptions.
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