Once upon a time, the crime of rape was not considered a crime if the perpetrator was a husband and the victim was a wife. Today it is recognized and treated as a criminal act in most states. Statutory rape, on the other hand, is often perfectly legal if the rapist marries his victim before the state moves against him (or her). Sexual intercourse between an adult and a minor is legal, once they are married, in just about every state.
Even though most states require couples to be over 18, they will also grant exceptions to minors, some with the approval of both parents, some with the approval of a judge, and some in cases of pregnancy or motherhood. Quite willing to overlook the illegal acts that bring pregnant minor brides to the altar, the state of Missouri has some of the most lenient laws in the country for these rapists, as it has no residency requirements, allows minors to wed as young as 15, and only demands the approval of one parent. There is no need to appear before a judge as a clerk can issue the license.
And that is why Heather Strawn’s father drove her and her 24-year-old boyfriend, Aaron Seaton, on Heather’s fifteenth birthday to Missouri when she was nine weeks pregnant. Heather was 14 years old when Seaton offered her alcohol and then sex in his camper which was parked in Ashton, Idaho, where the Strawns resided. Under Idaho’s marriage law, they would have had to appear in court and receive the approval of a judge which, they feared, might have resulted in Seaton’s arrest for statutory rape. Perhaps because it was statutory rape.
Heather’s father believed that by driving the 17 hours to Kansas City, Missouri, where Heather could marry at age 15 with a single parent’s consent, and no judicial oversight, they could avoid the chance of arrest, and the newborn would be legitimate. That was fine with Missouri, which has become somewhat of a “destination” for rapists who are willing to marry to avoid jail time (although the family did face problems when they returned to Idaho).
A March series in the Kansas City Star has taken an in-depth look at the state’s marriage laws.
...A review of some 50,000 marriage licenses shows how Missouri’s lax law has for years turned the state into a destination wedding spot for 15-year-old child brides, often rushing to get married. Some traveled up to 1,800 miles to Missouri, from as far off as Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Florida and every other state in the region: Kansas, Colorado, Illinois, Nebraska, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee.
Although marriage rates have dropped overall, for minors and adults, since 1999,
Some 8,350 kids under 18 (about 7,050 girls, 1,300 boys) have married in Missouri since 1999, ranking it among the top 10 states in the nation for child marriages, with Texas and Florida leading the pack at more than 40,000 and 16,000 respectively.
Should a new bill pass the state Senate and be signed by the state’s governor, that loophole will be closed as the new law would prohibit marriage between an adult of 21 and a child of 16 or younger. And Aaron Seaton would have been arrested on the spot, instead of traveling back to Idaho with his pregnant child bride.
When we think of child brides, we tend think of third world, or developing nations—we rarely consider the United States as a leader. And yet the United States, Saudi Arabia and Yemen do lead the world in the lowest minimum marriage age for girls. And this is not just a problem within immigrant communities, as most minors who wed are American grown girls from poorer, rural states like Kentucky, West Virginia and Idaho. PBS’ Frontline looked at child marriage last summer and quoted Nicholas Syrett, author of American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States:
“Almost all the evidence indicates that girls in cities don’t get married young, that girls from middle class or wealthy families, don’t get married young,” Syrett said. “This is a rural phenomenon and it is a phenomenon of poverty.”
Of course, early marriage does little to alleviate the poverty that these children face. Frontline found that 87 percent of the minors who wed were girls and that the adults they married were mostly 18, 19 and 20, although there were enough weddings with greater age differences to be alarming, including a 74-year-old Alabama man who married a child of 14. Eighty-six percent of the 207,468 child marriages for which Frontline was able to obtain data (eight states, including California, did not provide data) took place between minors and adults. In only 14 percent were both parties minors.
Although all states require that both parties be 18 in order to marry, most include loopholes that allow children as young as 12, and in 25 states, even younger, to wed in special circumstances. California is among the 25 states with no minimum age requirement if the special circumstances are met, as are Nevada, Washington, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Those states however, tend to require some scrutiny by the judiciary.
Another survey was included in a faculty publication of the College William & Mary Law School titled “The Age of Marital Capacity: Reconsidering Civil Recognition of Adolescent Marriage,” that revealed more about the size of the problem.
...more than one in ten of all U.S. women surveyed between 2001 and 2002 had married before age eighteen, with an estimated 9.4 million having married at age sixteen or younger.5 In 2010, more than 500,000 U.S. teens were married, divorced, separated, or widowed.6
The paper goes on to discuss the divorce rates of these marriages:
For decades now, age at marriage has been the most consistent and unequivocal predictor of marital failure.8 Of marriages entered at age twenty-five or later, fewer than thirty percent end in divorce.9 Of marriages entered before age eighteen, on the other hand, nearly seventy percent end in divorce.10 The earliest marriers, those adolescents who enter marriage in their mid-teens, experience marital failure rates closer to a sobering eighty percent.11
But before that marriage fails, the child bride may experience:
...higher rates of sexually transmitted infections and HIV,4–6 cervical cancer,7 unwanted pregnancies,8 pregnancy termination,8 death resulting from childbirth,1 and malnutrition in the offspring.9 Because schools are one of the primary venues for health education, differences in educational attainment according to age at the time of first marriage may contribute to this health disadvantage.9
According to a 2011 study in Pediatrics, “Child Marriage in the United States and Its Association With Mental Health in Women,”
We found that mental disorders are common among child-married women and that child marriage is associated with high rates of lifetime and current psychiatric disorders, as well as elevated use of mental health services. With controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, child marriage was significantly associated with all lifetime mental disorders except pathological gambling and histrionic and dependent personality disorders. This association was significant for all past-year mental disorders except alcohol abuse, drug use disorders, pathological gambling, bi-polar disorder, and psychotic disorder.
And unsurprisingly concludes:
Child marriage increases the risk of lifetime and current psychiatric disorders in the United States. Support for psychiatric vulnerabilities among women married in childhood is required.
In addition to health risks, a girl marrying during her teens and bearing children is likely to condemn herself and her children to continuing poverty as she fails to complete her education or obtain a job at a decent wage.
Activists, often victims themselves of childhood marriages, have been fighting back. Leading the fight in Florida is Sherry Johnson, who was raped by her church’s bishop at eight years old, and then by her church deacon. Pregnant, she gave birth to her first child at age 10, and was forced to marry the deacon at 11, becoming a wife and mother in the fifth grade.
She loved studying and even skipped a grade one year. As it turned out, school was the only normal thing in her life. But that, too, was taken from her. She made it somehow to the ninth grade but then could go on no longer. By the time she was 17, she was raising six children. She never knew what it was like to play sports or go to the prom or graduate. Robbed of her childhood, she lost all motivation.
Every day when she woke up, she cried.
…
She grew tired of her husband's lack of support and sought help from Legal Aid. They wrote her a check for $75 to pay an attorney to file for divorce. But not long after, at 19, she married a 37-year-old man. He, too, hurt her verbally and physically. She bore three more children and was 27 when her youngest daughter was born.
She eventually left him, joined a new church and formed a friendship with a woman, a psychologist, that she met there. It was through this friendship that she began to understand what had happened to her and through her religious faith that she found forgiveness for her mother, the men she married and most of all, for herself. In 2013 she wrote a novel “based on the horrific abuse and exploitation she suffered as a child, forced at age 11 to marry the 20-year-old man who had raped and impregnated her. She spent six years pressing to improve protections for Florida’s children.”
She became an activist, tirelessly walking the halls of the Tallahassee Capitol, lobbying hard for a bill that would protect the vulnerable children who even today face the life she knew in the 1970s. At 58, it looked like she may finally have succeeded as Florida was poised to become the first state to completely outlaw marriages under 18.
There has been little opposition to the bill, though critics would still like Florida to make exceptions for minors who are voluntary participants or if their would-be spouses are in the military. Young servicemen and women sometimes want to marry their girlfriends or boyfriends before deploying on dangerous missions.
To that argument, Johnson retorts: If you are under 18, you cannot make any other legal decisions. You cannot buy a house, join the military, vote, rent a car or drink alcohol. How is it possible then to make a wise decision about entering into a legally binding partnership, one that is meant to be permanent?
The bill that the governor signed on March 23, 2018, ends all marriages under age 17 and requires that a marriage for 17 year olds would only be allowed with parental consent and if there is no more than a two year age difference between the couple. The new law is a compromise, as are most, but it does represent a big step forward for the state that allowed 16,000 child marriages, second only to Texas.
Sherry Johnson was supported by Unchained at Last, a support organization that was formed by survivors of forced or arranged marriages, which are frequently child marriages, as well as the Tahirih Justice Center, a non-profit legal advocacy organization fighting violence against women.
Donna Pollard is another survivor of a childhood marriage. At 14, her behavior led to a stay at a facility in southern Indiana where she met and developed a crush on an attentive 29-year-old counselor.
She says he used his position as an employee to begin "grooming" her – writing letters, finding secluded places where they could be together. He was jealous, controlling. "But as a 14- or 15-year-old, I just thought it meant that he loved me so much.”
Her mother encouraged the relationship, often driving Donna from their home in Kentucky to meet the man she now refers to as the “perpetrator,” unwilling to use his name. They married when she was 16 and she had her daughter at 18. She left him soon after that and has worked hard to protect the other young girls of Kentucky from experiencing the same fate.
As in many other states, the resistance to reform has often come from conservatives and the evangelical fundamentalist community. In Kentucky, it was the Kentucky Family Foundation that insisted that parents should have the final say as to whether or not their children marry. Activists like Donna Pollard make clear that the judgement of a parent does not always serve the best interest of a child and that an outside party would provide another layer of protection for the child.
In March, Kentucky’s governor, Matt Bevin, signed the bill into law.
The new Kentucky law prohibits marriage under age 17 entirely, prevents 17-year-olds from marrying someone more than four years older, and puts in place a special judicial proceeding with numerous safeguards against forced marriage and other harm. Alongside the approval to marry, the court also simultaneously grants the 17-year-old the full rights and status of an adult, to help her protect herself in case of abuse.
That last part is critically important. In most states, even if a minor is allowed to marry, she is not automatically emancipated. As a married minor, she cannot initiate a divorce action on her own should the marriage become abusive—she must have an adult do it for her. Most shelters will not accept responsibility for a minor and will deny her entry should she escape that abusive relationship. Nor can she rent an apartment, buy a car, or sign a contract. She is trapped by the law into a marriage that the law never should have allowed in the first place without granting her full emancipation.
Fifteen-year-old Heather Strawn was very lucky. Although her father was willing to cart her off to Missouri to marry her 24-year-old rapist, his ex-wife, Heather’s mother, was not quite ready to abandon her daughter to her rapist. She notified the authorities in Idaho who opened an investigation into the marriage. Within three months, Heather had suffered a miscarriage, the marriage was annulled and both Keith Strawn and Aaron Seaton were facing trials.
At his sentencing, Seventh District Judicial Judge Gregory Moeller expressed his dismay with Seaton’s behavior, which took place while Seaton was on probation for a misdemeanor in another jurisdiction.
Seaton claimed that the girl seemed older than she was, but he knew she was only 14 at the time. Moeller noted that Seaton took advantage of the girl while she was drunk on multiple occasions. He also lied under oath about only having sex one time before leaving the state to be married in Missouri. He also noted that Seaton accused other men of having sex with the girl when she announced that she was pregnant. Moeller pointed out that the victim’s previous testimony, coupled with the time between the pair's first sexual encounter and the girl's realization that she was pregnant, pinpointed Seaton as the father.
Moeller also noted that Seaton’s efforts to marry the girl in Missouri may have been an attempt to shield himself from prosecution.
“Attempting to now present yourself as some kind of hero for trying to protect a pregnant teenager by marrying her yourself — I completely reject that as an explanation,” he said. “This didn’t happen once; it happened multiple times, and you clearly groomed the victim.”
He also noted Seaton’s “psychosexual evaluation, which mentioned other sexually deviant behavior, including that Seaton inappropriately touched a 6-year-old girl when he was 20.”
Judge Moeller disregarded the prosecution and defense requests for treatment and probation, finding that Seaton posed an unacceptable risk to the community and sentenced him to 15 years on the rape charges. He will also have to register as a sex offender.
Keith Strawn, Heather’s father and the one who drove her to Missouri and signed off on the marriage, also came in for some harsh truths from Judge Moeller who suspended his four year sentence for felony injury to a child, calling his parental judgement “abysmally poor” :
“Your daughter needed a parent. Instead she had an enabler,” Moeller intoned. “You were supposed to be the one with the better judgment and you completely failed in that regard.”
Strawn was sentenced to 120 days in jail for his role in promoting “a vile farce of a marriage.”
“Perhaps as you spend each of those 120 days in jail,” Moeller said, “you will think about the 120 days your daughter was married to a rapist because of you.”
Progress is being made, through the ruling of judges like Gregory Moeller who recognize the damage done by child marriages and through the efforts of individuals and organizations fighting for more just laws. In addition to their victories in Kentucky and Florida, they are making progress in Missouri, Arizona, Tennessee, Louisiana and Delaware. Unchained at Last has a timeline of progress being made in the individual states. Tahirih Justice Center has more information.
I for one, would be happy to relinguish our leading position as a nation that allows minors to marry. After all, that was the intent of the Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2010.
In 2010, the U.S. Senate unanimously voted to enact the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2010.1 The bill aimed “[t]o protect girls in developing countries through the prevention of child marriage,”2 and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton joined its drafters in denouncing “‘all cases of child marriage as child abuse.’”3
The bill failed in the House thanks to Republican obstruction, but Hillary Clinton’s words still ring true in denouncing: “all cases of child marriage as child abuse.” And, it might be added, even if they occur in the rural heartland of the “real” America.