by TOVIA SMITH
A photo of Rachel Holbrook on her wedding day. “The reason I smiled with my lips closed was because I still had braces and was self-conscious about them,” Holbrook says. PHOTO/Rachel Holbrook
More than 700 million women worldwide today were married as children, and most of them are in developing countries. But there is a growing recognition that many young teens are marrying in the United States as well — and several states are now taking action to stop it.
Advocates say the young marriages run the gamut: They include teens of every ethnicity and religion, teens who are American-born and teens who are not being forced into arranged marriages.
“To be honest with you, I begged my parents to let me get married,” says Rachel Holbrook, who was 15 when she decided she wanted to marry her 21-year-old boyfriend.
Partly, she says, it was because of her fundamentalist Christian upbringing.
“I thought that was God’s will for my life,” she says. “I had been pretty much taught from birth that the highest calling of a woman was to be a wife and mother and that I needed to do that to be in God’s will.”
Holbrook says her other motivation was her belief that sex before marriage was a sin.
“You know, at that age, sex is very high on your priority list,” she says.
After threatening to never speak to her parents again, she says they finally relented and signed papers allowing her to marry at 17.
Four kids and 12 years later, she divorced. Now, she believes teens should not be allowed to do what she did.
“I know how strongly you think you know what you want at that age,” she says. “But the truth of the matter is I was a kid when I got married and I think that’s almost in every case a bad idea.”
Loopholes In Legal Marrying Age
Advocates say child marriage endangers girls’ health, undermines their education and economic opportunities, and puts them at higher risk for domestic violence as well as divorce.
According to Jeanne Smoot of the Tahirih Justice Center, around 14,000 underage marriages occurred in the decade between 2000 and 2010 in New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia.
“That’s shocking to me,” says Maryland Delegate Vanessa Atterbeary. She was also stunned by how many of those teens were 14- and 15-year-olds and how many were marrying men a decade or two older.
Like most states, Maryland sets the minimum marriage age at 18, but teens can easily get around that with a note from their parents or a doctor’s note saying they’re pregnant.
Atterbeary is pushing a bill to tighten those loopholes. Even stricter measures are pending in New Jersey and in New York, where Assemblywoman Amy Paulin wants to ban all marriages under 18.
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