After nearly a decade of work, California has banned child marriage without exception. The law shows what can happen when survivors, advocates and lawmakers keep working together, even when change takes time.
I grew up around women who were wed while they were still children. My grandmother was married at just 10 years old and my aunt at 16. At school, friends of mine married. I watched their schooling stop, pregnancies that came too soon, choices made for them rather than by them. Relatives would ask, gently but pointedly, when I intended to do the same, as though delaying it only put off something inevitable.
What haunted me then—and still haunts me now—is how ordinary everyone around us made it seem.
That ordinariness is how child marriage has survived for so long in the United States. California has now banned it. On Sept. 30, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed bill AB 1267, setting 18 as the minimum age for marriage with no exceptions.
What It Took to End Child Marriage in California
What makes this reform especially significant is both what California’s law previously allowed, and how long it took to achieve change. Until now, California was one of three U.S. states, alongside Mississippi and New Mexico, with no minimum marriage age—meaning a child of any age could be married with parental and judicial consent. Reform came after nearly a decade of campaigning, with numerous setbacks along the way, but advocates kept returning to the issue, talking to legislators, building networks and support and making the case for change.
That is what perseverance looks like when change is slow. An effort can fall short without ending the work behind it. In Colombia, advocates spent 17 years pushing to end child marriage, with eight legislative attempts failing before the country changed its law in 2024. California’s experience took years too.
No single argument or organization explains how this happened. Unchained At Last convened the California Coalition to End Child Marriage, bringing together nearly 30 organizations, survivors and advocates, each bringing something the others could not. Survivors explained what a parent’s signature and a judge’s approval had meant for them; legal groups, Equality Now among them, brought international standards to legislators; service providers explained the barriers married minors can face when they try to access support. Together, they gave the campaign a broader and more grounded case for change.
Protecting children from forced marriage was something Democrats and Republicans in Sacramento could agree on.
Survivors did more than describe what had happened to them. They sat with legislators and explained, specifically, what needed to change in the law and why.
A survivor telling her story can move a room. A survivor explaining exactly how a law had failed to protect her can change how legislators understand what the law needs to do. In California, survivors did both.
The bill passed both houses unanimously. Protecting children from forced marriage was something Democrats and Republicans in Sacramento could agree on. That is a narrow example, but a real one, of human rights work finding common ground across political lines. Which is as it should be.
Girls are overwhelmingly the ones affected. Research from Unchained At Last found that between 2000 and 2021, more than 314,000 children were married across the United States—the vast majority of them girls—most of whom were married to adult men. Poverty, economic insecurity, unplanned pregnancy and family expectations can all lead families to believe child marriage is the solution, alongside the profound power imbalances built into these marriages.
Equality Now and Unchained At Last documented these legal gaps and their consequences in our joint report, “Legal Gaps and Enduring Harm: Analysing the Persistence of Child Marriage in the United States.”
Why the Law Matters for Girls
It safeguards against coercion.
The previous framework in California let a child marry under 18 with just one parent’s consent and a judge’s approval, neither a reliable safeguard against coercion. AB 1267 sets 18 as the minimum, removing any exceptions.
Marriage does not give a child all the legal rights of adulthood. A married teenager can be caught between systems: treated as outside the usual child-protection framework because she is married, yet too young for a domestic violence shelter designed for adults. This is as much about families failing children as it is about the legal system failing to protect them. Parents have a responsibility to protect their children, but the law also allows a parent’s signature and a judge’s approval to be treated as sufficient evidence of consent. Children cannot consent to marriage and no legal approval should make a marriage involving a child acceptable.
It closes a legal loophole that allows rape of a minor.
Marriage also operates as an exception to statutory rape laws in more than a third of states, previously including California, meaning an adult who would otherwise face criminal liability for sex with a minor could avoid that liability if they married.
The Rest of the Country Should Follow
California becomes the 18th state to set marriage at 18 without exception. Mississippi and New Mexico still have no minimum age at all. In Ohio, a similar bipartisan bill has cleared committee and awaits a Senate vote.
Passing AB 1267 is a beginning, not an ending. California must now implement and enforce it, and the advocacy needs to keep going state by state. That is the case Equality Now and Unchained At Last made in our joint submission to the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review, the U.N. process for examining countries’ human rights records.
California has just shown that what was once treated as ordinary does not have to remain inevitable. Eighteen states have now drawn a clear line.The rest of the country should follow. No child’s right to safety, freedom and a future of their own choosing should depend on the state in which they happens to live.
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