It was the word of God.
That’s what Rebecca Hurst’s husband would tell her when he forced himself on her despite her cries of pain. She was 16 years old, a high school junior—until he made her drop out. She was one of hundreds of thousands of girls across the United States suffering unspeakable harm because of outdated marriage-age laws.
The suffering must end.
I am a forced marriage survivor and the founder and executive director of Unchained At Last, a survivor-led nonprofit organization determined to end forced and child marriage in the United States. We at Unchained lead a growing national movement for which we have partnered with hundreds of survivors, including Hurst, and hundreds of organizations, including American Atheists, to ban child marriage— marriage before age 18—in every U.S. state, territory, and district.
We started this movement in 2015, at which time child marriage was legal across the U.S. and happening at an alarming rate: Our first-of-its-kind study showed 300,000 minors were entered into marriage in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018, and nearly all were girls wed to adult men. At least 60,000 marriages occurred at an age, or with a spousal age difference, that should have been considered a sex crime.
We are promoting simple, common-sense legislation to make the marriage age 18, no exceptions. Such legislation costs nothing and harms no one but eliminates what the U.S. State Department calls a “human rights abuse,” and the United Nations calls a “harmful practice,” because it destroys nearly every aspect of a girl’s life.
And yet, although we have convinced legislators in exactly 13 states and two territories to pass this legislation since 2015, legislators in the rest of the country have rejected, watered down, or refused even to entertain it.
We do not know of any major religion that condones forced marriage or child marriage; indeed, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faith leaders across the U.S. have joined us to urge legislators to set the marriage age to 18.
But some parents and religious leaders do not share that conviction. My own forced marriage in New York City, for example, took place within the insular, fundamentalist Orthodox Jewish community, where forced and child marriage remain the norm. Rebecca Hurst found out years after her marriage that her mother had secretly planned it with Hurst’s husband, a 22-year-old man they had met at church, out of concern that Hurst was veering off the “correct spiritual path” and headed for a “life of damnation.”
Regardless of the motivation for child marriage, it creates a nightmarish legal trap, as Hurst learned at age 16. Even the most mature 17-year-old does not have the rights of adulthood and therefore faces overwhelming legal and practical barriers if they try to escape from parents planning an unwanted wedding for them or from an abusive spouse. Taking basic steps such as leaving home, getting help from an advocate, entering a domestic violence shelter, retaining an attorney, or seeking a protective order are difficult if not impossible for minors. And, in many states, despite being allowed to marry, minors are not allowed to file for divorce.
“I was a child stuck in a very adult legal nightmare,” Hurst said. “I had no one advocating for me or my right to stay a child.”
Today, federal law does not specify a minimum age to petition for or be the beneficiary of a foreign spouse or fiancé, but does allow the government to approve spousal or fiancé visas involving minors if the marriage is legal in the state where the couple will reside. That means men in 37 states can legally import child brides from overseas. And it means girls in most of the U.S.—as young as age zero in four states— can legally be forced to marry adult men overseas who get a visa, a path to citizenship, and a child bride.
In other words, at the state and federal level, our country’s marriage-age laws—or lack thereof— not only legalize but actually incentivize the international trafficking of minors under the guise of marriage.
We cannot allow the suffering Hurst and so many others have endured to continue. Please join Unchained At Last, American Atheists, and our other allies in our effort to convince legislators to ban child marriage in the remaining 37 U.S. states, three territories, and one district.
“We are here to advocate for those who have no one to stand up for them,” Hurst said, “and no one who will fight for them.