The Campaign to End Forced and Child Marriage
The National Consumers League (NCL) is recognized globally for its work protecting children from being exploited for their labor and from being forced to work in unsafe environments.
But NCL also deserves recognition for its crucial work on another child welfare issue that has not received the attention it warrants in the United States: child marriage.
Many people do not realize that child marriage, or marriage before age 18, remains legal in most of the United States, even though it is a particularly insidious form of forced marriage—and forced marriage is a form of modern slavery. Indeed, the entire world has agreed child marriage is a harmful practice and has promised to eliminate it by the year 2030 to help achieve gender equality.
More than 300,000 minors, some as young as age 10, have entered into marriage in the United States since the turn of the century, and most were girls wed to adult men, according to research by Unchained At Last.
I founded Unchained out of my own traumatic experience after I escaped from an abusive forced marriage that began when I was 19 and kept me trapped for 15 years. We at Unchained are committed to ending forced and child marriage in the United States through direct services and systems change: We provide crucial, often lifesaving services to people who are escaping the horror of forced marriage and rebuilding their lives, while we also push relentlessly for social, policy, and legal change.
NCL has been a resourceful, committed partner as we make that push. It has brought to this fight its reputation for social justice advocacy, earned over more than a century, as it has testified before state legislatures and used its communications resources to raise awareness.
Together, we have seen stunning victories. Since 2018, we have convinced 13 U.S. states to ban child marriage, a human rights abuse that destroys girls’ lives and often gives a get-out-of-jail-free card to child rapists, since statutory rape within marriage is not considered a crime in most states.
We still have a lot of work to do. Child marriage remains legal in 37 states, and with alarming regularity, minors are being forced into marriage or forced to stay in marriages; due to their limited legal rights, they cannot easily take basic steps to seek safety, such as entering a domestic violence shelter or filing for divorce.
Working with NCL, we are urging lawmakers in the remaining 37 states to pass simple, commonsense legislation to make the marriage age 18, with no exceptions. Such legislation costs nothing and harms no one except child rapists.
The challenge before us is daunting, but I am optimistic. I look at what NCL has accomplished over its 125 years in advancing workplace safety, fair wages and work conditions, and access to healthcare, and I know that, with NCL as our ally, we will soon celebrate the end of child marriage in the U.S.
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Fraidy Reiss, Founder and Executive Director of Unchained At Last, is a forced marriage survivor turned activist and the 2023 recipient of NCL’s Florence Kelley Award.
