Just for comparison and because it‘s a nice tidbit I was told recently: In Germany you are not allowed to be married until you are 18 but you can not be married until you are 16. That means any marriage below the age of 16 is not even recognized as such.
I‘m certain there is a solid reasoning behind it. We have many laws that seem weird or nonsensical at first but make sense when you get into detail. It‘s still not legal under 18, so I don‘t really mind it.
I understand the reasoning behind why the minimum age of marriage was originally well below 18, but it's outdated and has always had enormous potential for abuse.
It originally came from religious views about premarital sex and the idea that women were inferiors and under the care of their husbands anyway.
I knew this - I don’t think I knew it was all 50 states though. Americas got to do WAY better. No under 18. Until someone can legally self-advocate in every sense they are just being trafficked from parent to pedophile.
Scroll down a bit more.
You have to go out of state in some places to sign the paperwork.
What's needed is for the states where child "marriage" is illegal to make it null and void if the kid steps foot in that state, and for them to have support systems in place to save these girls (and it's always girls). File it under anti-child-sex-trafficking and get it done.
Just stop it everywhere.
“ The solution, she said, is for every U.S. state and the District of Columbia to raise the minimum age for marriage to 18, with no exceptions.”
Trying to do that federally will have Trump's judges strike it down as unconstitutional.
Blue states should be able to do this without needing to retire federal supreme court judges.
Actually, I'd like to see it, I'd like to see the bumbling fools stumbling over "buh buh buh states rights" of all the things that are federally mandated, fuckin why isn't the minimum age for marriage???
They won’t stumble over anything. They will say state’s rights. The absolute best they can do is requiring the parents to consent but they will, either because they are getting some kind of dowry or because they are religious nuts who don’t think it’s pedophilia if it’s blessed by “God”.
It’s important to remember that we are unfortunately in this predicament because RBG did not want to give up power.
We need to get rid of these Surpreme court assholes.
Great idea but the states will scream “states rights” and it will end up like other important stuff such as abortion. Your state outlaw it? Well I’ll just drive this way, get it done, and come back.
It’s just crazy - we are watching this from north of 49 and it’s like a fake movie. My daughter has reconsidered going to university in the states because of it
The system has been broken since inception and the right wing zealots have been doing and saying the same things for literal centuries. If humanity as a collective just decided to stop listening to old white men who are racist, homophobic, transphobic, Nazis we would be better off but for some reason people tolerate this disgusting rhetoric.
In general, a law like that wouldn't stand up, due to the full faith and credit clause. From a different perspective, think about conservative states prior to Obergefell saying gay marriages are void in their state
I thought the Mann Act was supposed to outlaw travelling to another state in order to have sex with a child.
America - a fourth-rate third-world country.
The coincidence/irony in that it was introduced by a guy with the last name Mann...also for others who didn't know about this, [wiki link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act) some of that history in there...makes me wonder how far have we *really* come as a society wanting this to *stop already*
Why? The wouldn't be doing anything outside their own states.
(Yes, I know "States Rights" is only ever used to let red states get away with whatever evil shit they want to do)
Full faith and credit clause. The Obergefell decision requires the states to recognize valid marriages performed in other states (well, doesn't allow them to reject them on the basis of being same-sex marriages, but the reasoning given doesn't actually have much to do with that).
As long as spousal rape is also illegal in the good states, you go after the "husband" for statutory rape and give the kid emancipated minor status because their parents sold them into sex slavery. Sick the feds on the parents at the same time for that under sex trafficking laws.
No need to directly go after the marriage contract. Or you could argue that the child was too young to sign a contract, therefore the marriage was never valid in the first place.
There's ways around it if the will is there.
>As long as spousal rape is also illegal in the good states, you go after the "husband" for statutory rape and give the kid emancipated minor status because their parents sold them into sex slavery. Sick the feds on the parents at the same time for that under sex trafficking laws.
Age of consent is less than 18 in most of the US, and many states have a marriage exemption. You'd also have to prove that a specific instance of sex occurred in your state. Sex trafficking laws prohibit transporting minors across state lines for sexual purposes, which does not cover marriage.
The contract argument is no good either, since parents need to be able to enter into contracts on their children's behalf for a number of reasons.
> sexual purposes, which does not cover marriage.
I hate that you're probably right by the letter of the law here.
> many states have a marriage exemption.
So get rid of the marriage exemption in the good states.
> since parents need to be able to enter into contracts on their children's behalf for a number of reasons.
Make marriage *not one of them*.
> Dictating what contracts are valid in other states actually is impossible.
We did it for chattel slaves back in the civil war days.
We just need to restore those laws, and extend them to child sex slaves as well.
[Unchained At Last](https://www.unchainedatlast.org/child-marriage-in-the-u-s/) is working to end child marriage in the US. Their advocacy has helped 12 states ban it.
>Child marriage, or marriage before age 18, was legal in all 50 U.S. states as of 2017. Thanks to Unchained’s relentless advocacy, that is changing. Delaware and New Jersey in 2018 became the first two states to end this human rights abuse, followed by American Samoa in 2018, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Pennsylvania and Minnesota in 2020, Rhode Island and New York in 2021, Massachusetts in 2022 Vermont, Connecticut and Michigan in 2023, and Washington and Virginia in 2024.
>However, child marriage remains legal in 38 states and is happening in the U.S. at an alarming rate: Unchained’s groundbreaking research revealed that nearly 300,000 children as young as 10 were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018 – mostly girls wed to adult men.
Someone under 18 can't vote, file a lawsuit, or get a bank account in some places, yet they can get married.
Yet there are people that are okay with this.
They can get "married," but can't file for divorce, and can't get a restraining order for domestic abuse.
The evidence for pedocon theory keeps piling up.
Especially with nonsense like this:
> As a minor, she could not file for divorce herself or seek refuge at a domestic violence shelter.
Adult enough to get married, but not adult enough to leave.
It gets worse when you start to think about it the way rightwing talking heads try to talk about it. Matt "the problem with teenage pregnancy is unwed teenage pregnancy" Walsh is probably the easiest mark and example to hit for this. Theres obviously a very specific reason why conservatives want child marriage around. But its not JUST so guys in their 30s can stalk/date/marry children. Its so that they can marry those children and trap them in an unhealthy relationship where the husband has all the power/say. The literal "dream" for conservatives.
Its not hard to get to the bottom of this discussion either with conservatives. You ask them why they defend child marriage, 99.9995% the answer is going to be "So two kids can get married duhhh". The immediate follow up question should -always- be "so why does it allow for an adult to marry a child" and you'll see exactly who that person is right away.
At the end of the day, its all just another extension of reducing women to second class citizens by encouraging a culture where parents give the OK for some pedophile to marry their daughter and trap her in an unequal relationship where she has no say and literally no rights to leave if she wants.
That's by design. These rules have been made and are continued by right wing theocrats to this day. They don't view girls or women as people - only property to exploit.
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Oh I'm going to address this with my state reps. The minimum age for marriage in my state is 16, but the minimum age for consent is 17. And I live in a blue state. This is unacceptable.
I don't like how the media uses the phrase "child marriage." It's a completely illegitimate marriage involving one party who isn't legally able to consent. Much in the same way that rape is not sex, this isn't a marriage. Anyone have any ideas on what we should be calling it?
"Child rape slavery" probably is blunt enough to hit all the emotional buttons while still being true.
Because you know they're getting their "wives" to do all the housework as well.
Technically it's not always between a pedophile and a kid.
In a lot of cases it's between two kids of the same age.
If a 16 year old has sex with another 16 year old and both consented, it's not rape.
It's only bad if it's a 16 year old and a 30 year old.
Absolutely horrifying “As a minor, she could not file for divorce herself or seek refuge at a domestic violence shelter.”
She can be married off without her consent, impregnated but still considered too young to flee to save herself.
It’s slavery.
This is the ultimate goal of the christian fascists, and why they're attacking America today. According to them, their ideal world is one in which child sexual rape and child birthrape are normalized.
Here are a few related [confessions](https://www.reddit.com/r/nationalwomensstrike/comments/12h17xn/this_sub_needs_to_be_shared_across_reddit/) from christian fascist lawmakers and the christian fascist seditionists they conspire with, but if you search, you can find *hundreds* more on video and in print.
So being a pedo is illegal (and rightly so), yet somehow it's still legal in most states, for a grown adult to marry a child (under certain conditions). On what f-ed up planet is this supposed to make sense?? 🤬
A grown person marrying a child is pedophile shit too, so make it make sense. Like , do they think these grown people are marrying these kids and not touching them or are they saying it's ok to tough them because they're married ( not too sure about the laws)? It's so disgusting and should have already been outlawed in this country , and the rest of the world should adapt it too.
Being a pedophile is only illegal for regular people like us if we get caught. For religious theocrats who think the world revolves around them it's supported and covered up if it gets out.
Another thing is that there needs to be upper age gap limits on all marriages.
I don't care if a 17 year old and another 17 year old want to marry each other. But if one person is 17 and the other person is 25 that should be banned.
Even if one person is 20 and the other person is 50 it should be banned because although it's not pedophilia, it still causes social instability because it's almost always young women marrying middle aged men.
You can't drink until 21 but you can have a baby? Much much difference between Christian values and Islamic values. Just wait for tRump to take over, a rapist himself leading the way. Well done America
They should lower the drinking age. It's wrong for 18-20 year olds to be allowed to get married and serve in a military and not be able to have alcohol.
This in combination with the push to repeal child labor laws has chilling implications. I can't listen to politicians talk about the declining birth rate without burning with rage, knowing that they want these kids to be slaves to capitalism.
I had a woman tell me this was perfectly acceptable, and gave me an attitude of derision. So I asked her if it was okay for me to marry her 12 year old son. I got silence as a response, I don't think she liked that. LOL
How have we not had enough of this? What the hell else needs to happen to protect children and women in this country?
I am so jarred by none of this resonating with so many right wing women in America. Like seriously, what is wrong with you people? Why would you advocate for your daughters having to go through this?
*Children not just daughters
This is crazy! I only just learned that child marriage is still legal in so many states. It's like when I learned about the age of consent in the Philippines, or that child pornography was legal in Japan until kind of recently. So surprised that these things still happen in seemingly developed places.
One of the things they twisted this argument into is that it would affect military people. As in some young man may want to enlist at 17 but can't marry his high school sweetheart its unfair or If two teenage people who get pregnant cant marry each other - aka family unit regardless of age.
Some religious groups use marriage as a convenient way to not make the family look bad by getting the daughter to marry the rapist - this is one reason fundies love it love it.
Welcome to right wing 'discussion.' Literally none of it is in good faith or good for the public. 100% of the time it benefits men and private institutions (namely religious and corps) and punishes everyone else for existing.
Four states having *no minimum age* for marriage as long as a judge signs off on it is horrifying.
Girls as young as 10.
I hate that my state's one of them. *Do better California!*
Unchained At Last is a nonprofit aimed towards ending legal child marriage. They’re very much worth supporting!
Just for comparison and because it‘s a nice tidbit I was told recently: In Germany you are not allowed to be married until you are 18 but you can not be married until you are 16. That means any marriage below the age of 16 is not even recognized as such.
Good. Should be 18 anyways, since minors can't access the same legal resources that adults can in order to get a divorce.
I‘m certain there is a solid reasoning behind it. We have many laws that seem weird or nonsensical at first but make sense when you get into detail. It‘s still not legal under 18, so I don‘t really mind it.
I understand the reasoning behind why the minimum age of marriage was originally well below 18, but it's outdated and has always had enormous potential for abuse. It originally came from religious views about premarital sex and the idea that women were inferiors and under the care of their husbands anyway.
Legislated abuse and pedophilia.
Which four states? I'm clearly googling incorrectly 😮💨
California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Mississippi.
I'm not even comfortable googling it.
There is a map in the article.
I knew this - I don’t think I knew it was all 50 states though. Americas got to do WAY better. No under 18. Until someone can legally self-advocate in every sense they are just being trafficked from parent to pedophile.
Scroll down a bit more. You have to go out of state in some places to sign the paperwork. What's needed is for the states where child "marriage" is illegal to make it null and void if the kid steps foot in that state, and for them to have support systems in place to save these girls (and it's always girls). File it under anti-child-sex-trafficking and get it done.
Just stop it everywhere. “ The solution, she said, is for every U.S. state and the District of Columbia to raise the minimum age for marriage to 18, with no exceptions.”
Trying to do that federally will have Trump's judges strike it down as unconstitutional. Blue states should be able to do this without needing to retire federal supreme court judges.
Actually, I'd like to see it, I'd like to see the bumbling fools stumbling over "buh buh buh states rights" of all the things that are federally mandated, fuckin why isn't the minimum age for marriage???
They won’t stumble over anything. They will say state’s rights. The absolute best they can do is requiring the parents to consent but they will, either because they are getting some kind of dowry or because they are religious nuts who don’t think it’s pedophilia if it’s blessed by “God”.
See that's exactly the kinda shit I want to see lawfully banned forever.
California has repeatedly refused to enact this legislation with the support of the ACLU.
California only did gun control because of racism. I'm honestly confused how California is blue in federal elections.
It’s important to remember that we are unfortunately in this predicament because RBG did not want to give up power. We need to get rid of these Surpreme court assholes.
I would love to hear that stupid fucking argument from our Supreme Court.
They wouldn't make one. They'd just call it unconstitutional and stop there.
So tie it to highway funding like the drinking age. The state can't have money unless it changes the law.
Great idea but the states will scream “states rights” and it will end up like other important stuff such as abortion. Your state outlaw it? Well I’ll just drive this way, get it done, and come back.
What good is the ability to issue an executive order if it doesn’t bypass the Supreme Court and stop child sex trafficking
I don’t know. I do know we are watching this play out right now with Abortion though.
It’s just crazy - we are watching this from north of 49 and it’s like a fake movie. My daughter has reconsidered going to university in the states because of it
The system has been broken since inception and the right wing zealots have been doing and saying the same things for literal centuries. If humanity as a collective just decided to stop listening to old white men who are racist, homophobic, transphobic, Nazis we would be better off but for some reason people tolerate this disgusting rhetoric.
In general, a law like that wouldn't stand up, due to the full faith and credit clause. From a different perspective, think about conservative states prior to Obergefell saying gay marriages are void in their state
I thought the Mann Act was supposed to outlaw travelling to another state in order to have sex with a child. America - a fourth-rate third-world country.
I would guess the technical way they get around that is they don't rape the kid until they get back to their home state? Or the law just doesn't care.
I suspect the latter.
The coincidence/irony in that it was introduced by a guy with the last name Mann...also for others who didn't know about this, [wiki link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act) some of that history in there...makes me wonder how far have we *really* come as a society wanting this to *stop already*
That’s a great idea
That's going to be a problem due to states' rights.
Why? The wouldn't be doing anything outside their own states. (Yes, I know "States Rights" is only ever used to let red states get away with whatever evil shit they want to do)
Full faith and credit clause. The Obergefell decision requires the states to recognize valid marriages performed in other states (well, doesn't allow them to reject them on the basis of being same-sex marriages, but the reasoning given doesn't actually have much to do with that).
As long as spousal rape is also illegal in the good states, you go after the "husband" for statutory rape and give the kid emancipated minor status because their parents sold them into sex slavery. Sick the feds on the parents at the same time for that under sex trafficking laws. No need to directly go after the marriage contract. Or you could argue that the child was too young to sign a contract, therefore the marriage was never valid in the first place. There's ways around it if the will is there.
>As long as spousal rape is also illegal in the good states, you go after the "husband" for statutory rape and give the kid emancipated minor status because their parents sold them into sex slavery. Sick the feds on the parents at the same time for that under sex trafficking laws. Age of consent is less than 18 in most of the US, and many states have a marriage exemption. You'd also have to prove that a specific instance of sex occurred in your state. Sex trafficking laws prohibit transporting minors across state lines for sexual purposes, which does not cover marriage. The contract argument is no good either, since parents need to be able to enter into contracts on their children's behalf for a number of reasons.
> sexual purposes, which does not cover marriage. I hate that you're probably right by the letter of the law here. > many states have a marriage exemption. So get rid of the marriage exemption in the good states. > since parents need to be able to enter into contracts on their children's behalf for a number of reasons. Make marriage *not one of them*.
Passing laws is hard. Amending existing laws is almost impossible. Dictating what contracts are valid in other states actually is impossible.
> Dictating what contracts are valid in other states actually is impossible. We did it for chattel slaves back in the civil war days. We just need to restore those laws, and extend them to child sex slaves as well.
[Unchained At Last](https://www.unchainedatlast.org/child-marriage-in-the-u-s/) is working to end child marriage in the US. Their advocacy has helped 12 states ban it. >Child marriage, or marriage before age 18, was legal in all 50 U.S. states as of 2017. Thanks to Unchained’s relentless advocacy, that is changing. Delaware and New Jersey in 2018 became the first two states to end this human rights abuse, followed by American Samoa in 2018, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Pennsylvania and Minnesota in 2020, Rhode Island and New York in 2021, Massachusetts in 2022 Vermont, Connecticut and Michigan in 2023, and Washington and Virginia in 2024. >However, child marriage remains legal in 38 states and is happening in the U.S. at an alarming rate: Unchained’s groundbreaking research revealed that nearly 300,000 children as young as 10 were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018 – mostly girls wed to adult men.
Someone under 18 can't vote, file a lawsuit, or get a bank account in some places, yet they can get married. Yet there are people that are okay with this.
They can get "married," but can't file for divorce, and can't get a restraining order for domestic abuse. The evidence for pedocon theory keeps piling up.
*pedophile havens
Especially with nonsense like this: > As a minor, she could not file for divorce herself or seek refuge at a domestic violence shelter. Adult enough to get married, but not adult enough to leave.
Welcome to the Hotel Mississippi.
It gets worse when you start to think about it the way rightwing talking heads try to talk about it. Matt "the problem with teenage pregnancy is unwed teenage pregnancy" Walsh is probably the easiest mark and example to hit for this. Theres obviously a very specific reason why conservatives want child marriage around. But its not JUST so guys in their 30s can stalk/date/marry children. Its so that they can marry those children and trap them in an unhealthy relationship where the husband has all the power/say. The literal "dream" for conservatives. Its not hard to get to the bottom of this discussion either with conservatives. You ask them why they defend child marriage, 99.9995% the answer is going to be "So two kids can get married duhhh". The immediate follow up question should -always- be "so why does it allow for an adult to marry a child" and you'll see exactly who that person is right away. At the end of the day, its all just another extension of reducing women to second class citizens by encouraging a culture where parents give the OK for some pedophile to marry their daughter and trap her in an unequal relationship where she has no say and literally no rights to leave if she wants.
This is just, backwards.
That's by design. These rules have been made and are continued by right wing theocrats to this day. They don't view girls or women as people - only property to exploit.
Child rape centers.
*Please remember to double check your voting information and register and Vote* www.vote.org Edit: Check your registration: https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/ Work for the Biden campaign: https://joebiden.com/work-with-us/ Volunteer for the DNC: https://events.democrats.org/
Oh I'm going to address this with my state reps. The minimum age for marriage in my state is 16, but the minimum age for consent is 17. And I live in a blue state. This is unacceptable.
I don't like how the media uses the phrase "child marriage." It's a completely illegitimate marriage involving one party who isn't legally able to consent. Much in the same way that rape is not sex, this isn't a marriage. Anyone have any ideas on what we should be calling it?
Child sex trafficking cause that’s what it is from parent to rapist
"Child rape slavery" probably is blunt enough to hit all the emotional buttons while still being true. Because you know they're getting their "wives" to do all the housework as well.
Thank you. The headlines sanitise the grim reality of what this is. Trafficking and rape.
Child enslavement and rape
Technically it's not always between a pedophile and a kid. In a lot of cases it's between two kids of the same age. If a 16 year old has sex with another 16 year old and both consented, it's not rape. It's only bad if it's a 16 year old and a 30 year old.
Absolutely horrifying “As a minor, she could not file for divorce herself or seek refuge at a domestic violence shelter.” She can be married off without her consent, impregnated but still considered too young to flee to save herself. It’s slavery.
This is the ultimate goal of the christian fascists, and why they're attacking America today. According to them, their ideal world is one in which child sexual rape and child birthrape are normalized. Here are a few related [confessions](https://www.reddit.com/r/nationalwomensstrike/comments/12h17xn/this_sub_needs_to_be_shared_across_reddit/) from christian fascist lawmakers and the christian fascist seditionists they conspire with, but if you search, you can find *hundreds* more on video and in print.
r/Defeat_Project_2025
So being a pedo is illegal (and rightly so), yet somehow it's still legal in most states, for a grown adult to marry a child (under certain conditions). On what f-ed up planet is this supposed to make sense?? 🤬
A grown person marrying a child is pedophile shit too, so make it make sense. Like , do they think these grown people are marrying these kids and not touching them or are they saying it's ok to tough them because they're married ( not too sure about the laws)? It's so disgusting and should have already been outlawed in this country , and the rest of the world should adapt it too.
Being a pedophile is only illegal for regular people like us if we get caught. For religious theocrats who think the world revolves around them it's supported and covered up if it gets out.
Another thing is that there needs to be upper age gap limits on all marriages. I don't care if a 17 year old and another 17 year old want to marry each other. But if one person is 17 and the other person is 25 that should be banned. Even if one person is 20 and the other person is 50 it should be banned because although it's not pedophilia, it still causes social instability because it's almost always young women marrying middle aged men.
You can't drink until 21 but you can have a baby? Much much difference between Christian values and Islamic values. Just wait for tRump to take over, a rapist himself leading the way. Well done America
Not “can” have a baby, *must* have a baby.
They should lower the drinking age. It's wrong for 18-20 year olds to be allowed to get married and serve in a military and not be able to have alcohol.
This in combination with the push to repeal child labor laws has chilling implications. I can't listen to politicians talk about the declining birth rate without burning with rage, knowing that they want these kids to be slaves to capitalism.
I had a woman tell me this was perfectly acceptable, and gave me an attitude of derision. So I asked her if it was okay for me to marry her 12 year old son. I got silence as a response, I don't think she liked that. LOL
Emanating the Taliban is not a good look.
Technically The Taliban (Islam in general) stole their ideas from Christianity and Judaism. It's been thousands of years of fucked up shit.
How have we not had enough of this? What the hell else needs to happen to protect children and women in this country? I am so jarred by none of this resonating with so many right wing women in America. Like seriously, what is wrong with you people? Why would you advocate for your daughters having to go through this? *Children not just daughters
Every day we slide further into medieval times.
Where’s all the people crying about “pedo Muhammad” now?
I would like to time travel back to before I read this post's title. 🤢
Christians, man....
Christians wrote America's fucked up laws but if you read the article it's South Asian immigrant parents frequently taking advantage of the law.
what a fucking world eh
This is crazy! I only just learned that child marriage is still legal in so many states. It's like when I learned about the age of consent in the Philippines, or that child pornography was legal in Japan until kind of recently. So surprised that these things still happen in seemingly developed places.
Yuck.
Ew.
Burn it all to the fucking ground.
Can someone explain to me what California's deal is? Why does that state protect pedophile marriage so hard?
One of the things they twisted this argument into is that it would affect military people. As in some young man may want to enlist at 17 but can't marry his high school sweetheart its unfair or If two teenage people who get pregnant cant marry each other - aka family unit regardless of age. Some religious groups use marriage as a convenient way to not make the family look bad by getting the daughter to marry the rapist - this is one reason fundies love it love it.
Absolutely none of that justifies having no lower age limit.
Yep
Welcome to right wing 'discussion.' Literally none of it is in good faith or good for the public. 100% of the time it benefits men and private institutions (namely religious and corps) and punishes everyone else for existing.
It's always girls who are affected by child marriage. I've never ever heard of even one case where it was a male child marrying an adult woman. Never.
38 states still legally permit child marriage. What havens are they talking about? It's the whole fucking country outside of the north east.
When Trump crashes the economy, working poor will be selling their teenage daughters, as has happened too many times in too many places.
🤢
Average Christians
There's no difference between fundie Christians and fundie Muslims. Both groups think it's ok to nonce kids as young as 10.