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If New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu signs a bill raising the minimum age of marriage to 18, the Granite State will join 12 other states that already ban child marriage.
A Northeastern University legal and domestic violence expert praised the move, but says there’s little likelihood of national legislation any time soon. In the meantime, she says the focus should be on changing U.S. immigration laws that promote child marriage.
The way it is now, “our immigration laws encourage child marriage,” says Hayat Bearat, visiting associate professor at Northeastern’s School of Law and director of the Domestic Violence Institute.
For starters, Bearat would like to see changes at the federal level that impose age restrictions on children immigrating to the United States to marry their sponsors, as well as U.S. children sponsoring spouses from overseas.
“There needs to be reform in our immigration laws to have the minimum age (of spousal visas) be 18 unless there’s an exception for extreme humanitarian reasons,” such as when a child’s life is in danger in their home country, Bearat says.
From 2007 to 2017, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reviewed more than 5,500 petitions by adults bringing a child spouse or fiance to the U.S., in addition to nearly 3,000 petitions that involved a child bringing over an adult spouse or fiance, Bearat says in her law journal article, “Caged by a Marriage.”
The immigration service “awarded some petitions where significant age differences existed,” Bearat writes. “Some examples include a 71-year-old U.S. citizen’s petition for a 17-year-old spouse, a 14-year-old U.S. citizen’s petition for a 48-year-old spouse, and 149 petitions in which a child was engaged or married to someone over the age of 40.”
Child marriage can be “utilized as a weapon in immigrant communities,” especially when a young spouse from overseas doesn’t know they have rights in the U.S. that did not exist in their home country, Bearat says.
She says child marriage is associated with with increased domestic violence, mental health issues, poverty and limited educational opportunities.
Legal experts say there is currently little chance of Congress passing national legislation to raise the age of marriage the way it raised the legal age of alcohol use to 21 in 1984.
Instead, advocacy groups such as Unchained At Last have focused on getting states to change their laws, Bearat says.
Despite a growing national momentum against underage marriage, state laws make it legal for people under 18 to get married in most U.S. states, especially if their union is approved by their parents or the courts.
Marrying before the age of 18 was legal in all 50 states until 2017. Now, 12 states — 13 if the New Hampshire bill gets gubernatorial approval — mandate married people reach the age of majority regardless of parental consent.
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State laws regarding the legal age of marriage can seem quite erratic.
For example, Mississippi has the highest legal marriage age: 21 for those without parental or guardian consent. Given such consent, a boy can marry at 17 and a girl at 15.
Lawmakers in North Carolina raised the legal age of marriage from 14 to 16 in 2021, adding the caveat that the spouse of a 16-year-old can be no more than four years older.
California has no minimum age requirement for marriage, although both parental approval and a court order are required for minors to wed.
“In some states, you can go before a judge and say, ‘I am a child asking to be married.’ The judge can say: ‘fine,’” Bearat says.
The hodgepodge of laws has allowed some contradictory situations to exist — such as children who are permitted to get married but are considered too young to sign a divorce contract, Bearat says.
Opponents of underage marriage also point to instances when girls are married to older men who would be considered statutory rapists outside the marriage bed.
Some politicians oppose increases in the marriage age.
New Hampshire state Rep. Jess Edwards, a Republican, questioned whether raising the marriage age to 18 restricts “the freedom of marriage as a legitimate social option when we do this to people who are of a ripe fertile age and may have a pregnancy and a baby involved.”
“Are we not in fact making abortion a much more desirable alternative when marriage might be the right solution for some freedom-loving couple?” he said.
“I’m not saying all child marriages are forced marriages,” Bearat says.
But pressure from parents and extended family, physical threats, emotional abuse, deception and age-related power imbalances between spouses — the younger spouse is nearly always female — make coercion a common element of child marriages, she says.