麻豆社

How young is too young to get married? That’s the contentious issue vexing campaigners and legislators across the USA, where each state gets to set the minimum age for marrying.

In 48 states, parental consent or permission from a judge is all that it takes for a child to marry. And in 17 of those states, there is no minimum age, meaning in theory that a two-year-old could get married.

Why is this a problem?

Campaigners worry vulnerable young girls are being pressured into getting married against their will, destroying their chance to finish their education and mature at their own rate. In the vast majority of cases, children are pushed into marriage by their parents in what campaigner Fraidy Reiss calls a “gender violence” issue.

Presenter Jane O'Brien with Tammy, a case study in the programme.

How many people are affected?

Figures suggest that as many as 2,500 American children are getting married each year, usually young girls to older men.

These children come from every corner of the country, from every major religion and secular background to every socio-economic group and American family, from those who have lived in the country for generations to newer arrivals.

Take someone like Fatima. She was just an average American 15-year-old, still at school, still with dreams of going to college and studying to become a doctor. Until, that is, on her 15th birthday, her father told her that her uncle was visiting from Kuwait and they had decided she was going to get married to her cousin.

“I was very vulnerable. I was being set up, basically, so all I felt at that point was just deceit,” Fatima says.

Fatima was briefly tempted to tell a judge in New York City, that her parents were coercing her, but a veiled threat from her father and the knowledge that her parents could wind up in jail if she accused them, stopped her from speaking out.

It took three-and-a-half-years of marriage before Fatima managed to get the contract annulled, long enough to kill her childhood dream of becoming a doctor.

For state legislatures to raise the minimum age of marriage to 18, which is also the age at which someone can sign a legal document. Fraidy Reiss is a forced marriage survivor who set up the pressure group Unchained at Last to lobby for a change. “We wear bridal gowns and chains to show the world this is what the world looks like for a girl or a woman who is forced to marry,” she tells reporter Jane O’Brian.

Between 2016 and 2018, 13 states raised their minimum age, in most cases to 16, with parental consent and approval from a judge. But for Fraidy that’s not enough. She wants states to follow Delaware’s example: in 2018 the eastern seaboard state said people had to be 18 if they wanted to get married.

Actually, yes, the so-called military argument. New Hampshire Republican David Bates blocked a bill to raise the age limit to 18, partly because he says if young people can join the military at 17, they should be considered old enough to get married.

“[They can] potentially risk their lives in service to our country… yet they’re too immature to make a decision about marriage?” he says.

Plus, if someone in the military marries a 16-year-old, then the entire family qualifies for government-funded medical insurance, which would cover them if, say, the 16-year-old had a baby.