In the US, there are still states where girls can marry while under the age of 16— with parental consent. Virginia is no longer one of those states. Andrew Buncombe with The Independent reports:
Between 2004 and 2013, around 4,500 children under the age of 18 got married in the state of Virginia. Of these girls, more than 200 of them were aged 15 or under. Last week, the authorities in the state introduced new legislation that updated rules that had until then made it legal for girls aged 12 or 13 to get married if they had parental consent and were pregnant.
The law is a result of a long battle by activists who said “the change was aimed at curbing forced marriage, human trafficking and statutory rape disguised as marriage.” In one case, a man in his 50’s was suspected of having sexual relations with a teen girl in high school. When he realized child protective services were on to him and moving in, he talked the girl’s parents into letting him marry her to save himself from prosecution.
“Now they’re married, and there’s no crime,” said Ms Vogel, a lawyer who is running for lieutenant governor. “She dropped out of high school. Her life is ruined.”
Statistics show that girls who marry young are much less likely to finish high school and tend to have more children at an early age. The World Police Centre states that “girls who married before the age of 18 are three times more likely to have been beaten by their spouse than women married at age 21 or older.” In a recent article actress/writer/activist Ashely Judd wrote a piece about the subject in The Guardian:
Child marriage is a mass abuse of human rights. It undercuts global development. If a girl stays in school longer, her future earnings can increase dramatically. For each additional year a young woman spends in school, the age at which she will have her first child will be delayed by six to 10 months. Child marriage debilitates and isolates her. Being a child bride dramatically increases her risk of facing death or injury. In fact, complications from pregnancy and childbirth are among the leading causes of death among adolescent girls aged 15 to 19. The adolescent wife is ill-equipped to care, emotionally and financially, for her children who do survive.
Below is a video by YouTube celebrity activist Coby Persin, who staged a wedding photo shoot in New York City. The married couple included a 65-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl. The response by the local bystanders was very encouraging.
Persin said he organized the experiment to highlight the tragic number of girls (over 33,000) around the world who are forced to marry, some aged as young as 6-years-old. He said, “New Yorker’s didn't stand for a child getting married to an older man, and neither should anywhere else in the world be ok with it.”
The new Virginia law went into effect last Friday.