11 Yrs Old Mom Pushed to Marry Her Rapist in Florida
BeaverFever @ Mon May 29, 2017 6:23 pm
No not Muslims, Red state American Christians, aided and abetted by Republican lawmakers.
$1:
11 Years Old, a Mom, and Pushed to Marry Her Rapist in Florida
May 26, 2017
Op-Ed Columnist
Anna Parini
Nicholas Kristof
When she was a scrawny 11-year-old, Sherry Johnson found out one day that she was about to be married to a 20-year-old member of her church who had raped her.
“It was forced on me,” she recalls. She had become pregnant, she says, and child welfare authorities were investigating — so her family and church officials decided the simplest way to avoid a messy criminal case was to organize a wedding.
“My mom asked me if I wanted to get married, and I said, ‘I don’t know, what is marriage, how do I act like a wife?’” Johnson remembers today, many years later. “She said, ‘Well, I guess you’re just going to get married.’”
So she was. A government clerk in Tampa, Fla., refused to marry an 11-year-old, even though this was legal in the state, so the wedding party went to nearby Pinellas County, where the clerk issued a marriage license. The license (which I’ve examined) lists her birth date, so officials were aware of her age.
Not surprisingly, the marriage didn’t work out — two-thirds of marriages of underage girls don’t last, one study found — but it did interrupt Johnson’s attendance at elementary school. Today she is campaigning for a state law to curb underage marriages, part of a nationwide movement to end child marriage in America. Meanwhile, children 16 and under are still being married in Florida at a rate of one every few days.
You’re thinking: “Child marriage? That’s what happens in Bangladesh or Tanzania, not America!”
In fact, more than 167,000 young people age 17 and under married in 38 states between 2000 and 2010, according to a search of available marriage license data by a group called Unchained at Last, which aims to ban child marriage. The search turned up cases of 12-year-old girls married in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina, while other states simply had categories of “14 and younger.”
Unchained at Last was not able to get data for the other states. But it extrapolated that in the entire country, there were almost 250,000 child marriages between 2000 and 2010. Some backing for that estimate comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, which says that at least 57,800 Americans age 15 to 17 reported being in marriages in 2014.
Among the states with the highest rates of child marriages were Arkansas, Idaho and Kentucky. The number of child marriages has been falling, but every state in America still allows underage girls to marry, typically with the consent of parents, a judge or both. Twenty-seven states do not even set a minimum age by statute, according to the Tahirih Justice Center’s Forced Marriage Initiative.
A great majority of the child marriages involve girls and adult men. Such a sexual relationship would often violate statutory rape laws, but marriage sometimes makes it legal.
In New Hampshire, a girl scout named Cassandra Levesque learned that girls in her state could marry at 13. So she set out to change the law.
A legislator sponsored Cassandra’s bill to raise the age to 18, and researchers found that two 15-year-olds had recently married in New Hampshire, along with one 13-year-old. But politicians resisted the initiative.
“We’re asking the Legislature to repeal a law that’s been on the books for over a century, that’s been working without difficulty, on the basis of a request from a minor doing a Girl Scout project,” scoffed one state representative, David Bates. In March the Republican-led House voted to kill the bill, leaving the minimum age at 13. (Legislators seem willing to marry off girls like Cassandra, but not to listen to them!)
New Jersey lawmakers passed a bill that would make their state the first in the country to ban marriages of people under 18, but Gov. Chris Christie this month blocked the legislation. New York legislators are considering a bill backed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to raise the age to 17, from the current minimum, 14.
Opponents worry that raising the age will lead to out-of-wedlock births, and they note that many underage marriages are consensual.
Globally, a girl marries before the age of 15 every seven seconds, according to estimates by Save the Children. As in Africa and Asia, the reasons for such marriages in the U.S. are often cultural or religious; the American families follow conservative Christian, Muslim or Jewish traditions, and judges sometimes feel that they shouldn’t intrude on other cultures.
Johnson, the former 11-year-old unwitting bride who is now fighting for Florida to set a minimum marriage age (there is none now), says that her family attended a conservative Pentecostal church and that other girls of a similar age periodically also married. Often, she says, this was to hide rapes by church elders.
She says she was raped by both a minister and a parishioner and gave birth to a daughter when she was just 10 (the birth certificate confirms that). A judge approved the marriage to end the rape investigation, she says, telling her, “What we want is for you to get married.”
“It was a terrible life,” Johnson recalls, recounting her years as a child raising children. She missed school and remembers spending her days changing diapers, arguing with her husband and struggling to pay expenses. She ended up with pregnancy after pregnancy — nine children in all — while her husband periodically abandoned her.
“They took the handcuffs from handcuffing him,” she says, referring to the risk he faced of arrest for rape, “to handcuffing me, by marrying me without me knowing what I was doing.”
“You can’t get a job, you can’t get a car, you can’t get a license, you can’t sign a lease,” she adds, “so why allow someone to marry when they’re still so young?”
Those are precisely the reasons marriages for even 17-year-olds are problematic, according to Fraidy Reiss, who founded Unchained at Last to fight forced marriage and child marriage. Bullied by their parents into marriage, she says, girls may feel powerless to object — and fearful of telling a judge that they don’t want to wed. If they try to flee an abusive marriage, they are turned away from shelters and may be treated as simple runaways.
Some judges and clerks intervene on behalf of young girls; others do not. Reiss says one clerk told a 16-year-old bride: “Don’t cry. This is supposed to be the happiest day of your life.”
“For almost all of them,” says Reiss, “marriage means rape on their wedding night and thereafter.” Reiss, now 42, says she was forced into a marriage at age 19 by her ultra-Orthodox Jewish family.
Lyndsy Duet, now a school counselor in Texas, told me that she was forced into a marriage at 17 after enduring a series of rapes beginning when she was 14, by a young man her conservative Christian family had taken into the house. Confused, shamed and helpless, she didn’t speak up — but her rapist did.
“He asked my parents if he could marry me,” Duet remembers. “My mom was crying, she was so happy.”
Duet felt powerless to resist her parents’ pressure — and it was eight years before she could flee what she says was a violent marriage. Once, she says, her husband threatened her with a chain saw, and it was only when she went to college on her own and proved a brilliant student (she graduated first in her class) that she was able to escape.
“Most girls who reach out to us love their families,” Reiss says, “and their primary concern is that they don’t want their families to get into trouble.”
The United States has denounced child marriage in other countries as a “human rights abuse that contributes to economic hardship,” in the words of a State Department document published last year.
Let’s listen to ourselves. State legislators must understand that child marriage is devastating in Niger and Afghanistan — and also in New York and Florida. It’s past time to end child marriage right here at home.
May 26, 2017
Op-Ed Columnist
Anna Parini
Nicholas Kristof
When she was a scrawny 11-year-old, Sherry Johnson found out one day that she was about to be married to a 20-year-old member of her church who had raped her.
“It was forced on me,” she recalls. She had become pregnant, she says, and child welfare authorities were investigating — so her family and church officials decided the simplest way to avoid a messy criminal case was to organize a wedding.
“My mom asked me if I wanted to get married, and I said, ‘I don’t know, what is marriage, how do I act like a wife?’” Johnson remembers today, many years later. “She said, ‘Well, I guess you’re just going to get married.’”
So she was. A government clerk in Tampa, Fla., refused to marry an 11-year-old, even though this was legal in the state, so the wedding party went to nearby Pinellas County, where the clerk issued a marriage license. The license (which I’ve examined) lists her birth date, so officials were aware of her age.
Not surprisingly, the marriage didn’t work out — two-thirds of marriages of underage girls don’t last, one study found — but it did interrupt Johnson’s attendance at elementary school. Today she is campaigning for a state law to curb underage marriages, part of a nationwide movement to end child marriage in America. Meanwhile, children 16 and under are still being married in Florida at a rate of one every few days.
You’re thinking: “Child marriage? That’s what happens in Bangladesh or Tanzania, not America!”
In fact, more than 167,000 young people age 17 and under married in 38 states between 2000 and 2010, according to a search of available marriage license data by a group called Unchained at Last, which aims to ban child marriage. The search turned up cases of 12-year-old girls married in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina, while other states simply had categories of “14 and younger.”
Unchained at Last was not able to get data for the other states. But it extrapolated that in the entire country, there were almost 250,000 child marriages between 2000 and 2010. Some backing for that estimate comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, which says that at least 57,800 Americans age 15 to 17 reported being in marriages in 2014.
Among the states with the highest rates of child marriages were Arkansas, Idaho and Kentucky. The number of child marriages has been falling, but every state in America still allows underage girls to marry, typically with the consent of parents, a judge or both. Twenty-seven states do not even set a minimum age by statute, according to the Tahirih Justice Center’s Forced Marriage Initiative.
A great majority of the child marriages involve girls and adult men. Such a sexual relationship would often violate statutory rape laws, but marriage sometimes makes it legal.
In New Hampshire, a girl scout named Cassandra Levesque learned that girls in her state could marry at 13. So she set out to change the law.
A legislator sponsored Cassandra’s bill to raise the age to 18, and researchers found that two 15-year-olds had recently married in New Hampshire, along with one 13-year-old. But politicians resisted the initiative.
“We’re asking the Legislature to repeal a law that’s been on the books for over a century, that’s been working without difficulty, on the basis of a request from a minor doing a Girl Scout project,” scoffed one state representative, David Bates. In March the Republican-led House voted to kill the bill, leaving the minimum age at 13. (Legislators seem willing to marry off girls like Cassandra, but not to listen to them!)
New Jersey lawmakers passed a bill that would make their state the first in the country to ban marriages of people under 18, but Gov. Chris Christie this month blocked the legislation. New York legislators are considering a bill backed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to raise the age to 17, from the current minimum, 14.
Opponents worry that raising the age will lead to out-of-wedlock births, and they note that many underage marriages are consensual.
Globally, a girl marries before the age of 15 every seven seconds, according to estimates by Save the Children. As in Africa and Asia, the reasons for such marriages in the U.S. are often cultural or religious; the American families follow conservative Christian, Muslim or Jewish traditions, and judges sometimes feel that they shouldn’t intrude on other cultures.
Johnson, the former 11-year-old unwitting bride who is now fighting for Florida to set a minimum marriage age (there is none now), says that her family attended a conservative Pentecostal church and that other girls of a similar age periodically also married. Often, she says, this was to hide rapes by church elders.
She says she was raped by both a minister and a parishioner and gave birth to a daughter when she was just 10 (the birth certificate confirms that). A judge approved the marriage to end the rape investigation, she says, telling her, “What we want is for you to get married.”
“It was a terrible life,” Johnson recalls, recounting her years as a child raising children. She missed school and remembers spending her days changing diapers, arguing with her husband and struggling to pay expenses. She ended up with pregnancy after pregnancy — nine children in all — while her husband periodically abandoned her.
“They took the handcuffs from handcuffing him,” she says, referring to the risk he faced of arrest for rape, “to handcuffing me, by marrying me without me knowing what I was doing.”
“You can’t get a job, you can’t get a car, you can’t get a license, you can’t sign a lease,” she adds, “so why allow someone to marry when they’re still so young?”
Those are precisely the reasons marriages for even 17-year-olds are problematic, according to Fraidy Reiss, who founded Unchained at Last to fight forced marriage and child marriage. Bullied by their parents into marriage, she says, girls may feel powerless to object — and fearful of telling a judge that they don’t want to wed. If they try to flee an abusive marriage, they are turned away from shelters and may be treated as simple runaways.
Some judges and clerks intervene on behalf of young girls; others do not. Reiss says one clerk told a 16-year-old bride: “Don’t cry. This is supposed to be the happiest day of your life.”
“For almost all of them,” says Reiss, “marriage means rape on their wedding night and thereafter.” Reiss, now 42, says she was forced into a marriage at age 19 by her ultra-Orthodox Jewish family.
Lyndsy Duet, now a school counselor in Texas, told me that she was forced into a marriage at 17 after enduring a series of rapes beginning when she was 14, by a young man her conservative Christian family had taken into the house. Confused, shamed and helpless, she didn’t speak up — but her rapist did.
“He asked my parents if he could marry me,” Duet remembers. “My mom was crying, she was so happy.”
Duet felt powerless to resist her parents’ pressure — and it was eight years before she could flee what she says was a violent marriage. Once, she says, her husband threatened her with a chain saw, and it was only when she went to college on her own and proved a brilliant student (she graduated first in her class) that she was able to escape.
“Most girls who reach out to us love their families,” Reiss says, “and their primary concern is that they don’t want their families to get into trouble.”
The United States has denounced child marriage in other countries as a “human rights abuse that contributes to economic hardship,” in the words of a State Department document published last year.
Let’s listen to ourselves. State legislators must understand that child marriage is devastating in Niger and Afghanistan — and also in New York and Florida. It’s past time to end child marriage right here at home.
https://nytimes.com/2017/05/26/opinion/ ... he-us.html
bootlegga @ Mon May 29, 2017 8:30 pm
Disgusting! 
Jack_Styner @ Mon May 29, 2017 10:05 pm
The reasoning given by the politician is beyond stupid. This law is beyond stupid. It should be changed as soon as possible. Marrying off children. Seriously? What are the parents thinking??
Thanos @ Mon May 29, 2017 10:14 pm
The parents are cultists so they aren't thinking at all.
Freakinoldguy @ Mon May 29, 2017 10:42 pm
Thanos Thanos:
The parents are cultists so they aren't thinking at all.
Just like the Muslim's.
Thanos @ Mon May 29, 2017 10:46 pm
Just like anyone anywhere who has a fundamentalist mentality. 
stratos @ Tue May 30, 2017 12:03 am
I would love to see how far back these laws go. I'm thinking post Civil war era maybe even pre civil war. The sooner these outdated laws are removed from any type of legal standing the better.
rickc @ Tue May 30, 2017 12:39 am
BeaverFever BeaverFever:
No not Muslims, Red state American Christians, aided and abetted by Republican lawmakers.
https://nytimes.com/2017/05/26/opinion/ ... he-us.html
$1:
11 Years Old, a Mom, and Pushed to Marry Her Rapist in Florida
May 26, 2017
Op-Ed Columnist
Anna Parini
Nicholas Kristof
When she was a scrawny 11-year-old, Sherry Johnson found out one day that she was about to be married to a 20-year-old member of her church who had raped her.
“It was forced on me,” she recalls. She had become pregnant, she says, and child welfare authorities were investigating — so her family and church officials decided the simplest way to avoid a messy criminal case was to organize a wedding.
“My mom asked me if I wanted to get married, and I said, ‘I don’t know, what is marriage, how do I act like a wife?’” Johnson remembers today, many years later. “She said, ‘Well, I guess you’re just going to get married.’”
So she was. A government clerk in Tampa, Fla., refused to marry an 11-year-old, even though this was legal in the state, so the wedding party went to nearby Pinellas County, where the clerk issued a marriage license. The license (which I’ve examined) lists her birth date, so officials were aware of her age.
Not surprisingly, the marriage didn’t work out — two-thirds of marriages of underage girls don’t last, one study found — but it did interrupt Johnson’s attendance at elementary school. Today she is campaigning for a state law to curb underage marriages, part of a nationwide movement to end child marriage in America. Meanwhile, children 16 and under are still being married in Florida at a rate of one every few days.
You’re thinking: “Child marriage? That’s what happens in Bangladesh or Tanzania, not America!”
In fact, more than 167,000 young people age 17 and under married in 38 states between 2000 and 2010, according to a search of available marriage license data by a group called Unchained at Last, which aims to ban child marriage. The search turned up cases of 12-year-old girls married in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina, while other states simply had categories of “14 and younger.”
Unchained at Last was not able to get data for the other states. But it extrapolated that in the entire country, there were almost 250,000 child marriages between 2000 and 2010. Some backing for that estimate comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, which says that at least 57,800 Americans age 15 to 17 reported being in marriages in 2014.
Among the states with the highest rates of child marriages were Arkansas, Idaho and Kentucky. The number of child marriages has been falling, but every state in America still allows underage girls to marry, typically with the consent of parents, a judge or both. Twenty-seven states do not even set a minimum age by statute, according to the Tahirih Justice Center’s Forced Marriage Initiative.
A great majority of the child marriages involve girls and adult men. Such a sexual relationship would often violate statutory rape laws, but marriage sometimes makes it legal.
In New Hampshire, a girl scout named Cassandra Levesque learned that girls in her state could marry at 13. So she set out to change the law.
A legislator sponsored Cassandra’s bill to raise the age to 18, and researchers found that two 15-year-olds had recently married in New Hampshire, along with one 13-year-old. But politicians resisted the initiative.
“We’re asking the Legislature to repeal a law that’s been on the books for over a century, that’s been working without difficulty, on the basis of a request from a minor doing a Girl Scout project,” scoffed one state representative, David Bates. In March the Republican-led House voted to kill the bill, leaving the minimum age at 13. (Legislators seem willing to marry off girls like Cassandra, but not to listen to them!)
New Jersey lawmakers passed a bill that would make their state the first in the country to ban marriages of people under 18, but Gov. Chris Christie this month blocked the legislation. New York legislators are considering a bill backed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to raise the age to 17, from the current minimum, 14.
Opponents worry that raising the age will lead to out-of-wedlock births, and they note that many underage marriages are consensual.
Globally, a girl marries before the age of 15 every seven seconds, according to estimates by Save the Children. As in Africa and Asia, the reasons for such marriages in the U.S. are often cultural or religious; the American families follow conservative Christian, Muslim or Jewish traditions, and judges sometimes feel that they shouldn’t intrude on other cultures.
Johnson, the former 11-year-old unwitting bride who is now fighting for Florida to set a minimum marriage age (there is none now), says that her family attended a conservative Pentecostal church and that other girls of a similar age periodically also married. Often, she says, this was to hide rapes by church elders.
She says she was raped by both a minister and a parishioner and gave birth to a daughter when she was just 10 (the birth certificate confirms that). A judge approved the marriage to end the rape investigation, she says, telling her, “What we want is for you to get married.”
“It was a terrible life,” Johnson recalls, recounting her years as a child raising children. She missed school and remembers spending her days changing diapers, arguing with her husband and struggling to pay expenses. She ended up with pregnancy after pregnancy — nine children in all — while her husband periodically abandoned her.
“They took the handcuffs from handcuffing him,” she says, referring to the risk he faced of arrest for rape, “to handcuffing me, by marrying me without me knowing what I was doing.”
“You can’t get a job, you can’t get a car, you can’t get a license, you can’t sign a lease,” she adds, “so why allow someone to marry when they’re still so young?”
Those are precisely the reasons marriages for even 17-year-olds are problematic, according to Fraidy Reiss, who founded Unchained at Last to fight forced marriage and child marriage. Bullied by their parents into marriage, she says, girls may feel powerless to object — and fearful of telling a judge that they don’t want to wed. If they try to flee an abusive marriage, they are turned away from shelters and may be treated as simple runaways.
Some judges and clerks intervene on behalf of young girls; others do not. Reiss says one clerk told a 16-year-old bride: “Don’t cry. This is supposed to be the happiest day of your life.”
“For almost all of them,” says Reiss, “marriage means rape on their wedding night and thereafter.” Reiss, now 42, says she was forced into a marriage at age 19 by her ultra-Orthodox Jewish family.
Lyndsy Duet, now a school counselor in Texas, told me that she was forced into a marriage at 17 after enduring a series of rapes beginning when she was 14, by a young man her conservative Christian family had taken into the house. Confused, shamed and helpless, she didn’t speak up — but her rapist did.
“He asked my parents if he could marry me,” Duet remembers. “My mom was crying, she was so happy.”
Duet felt powerless to resist her parents’ pressure — and it was eight years before she could flee what she says was a violent marriage. Once, she says, her husband threatened her with a chain saw, and it was only when she went to college on her own and proved a brilliant student (she graduated first in her class) that she was able to escape.
“Most girls who reach out to us love their families,” Reiss says, “and their primary concern is that they don’t want their families to get into trouble.”
The United States has denounced child marriage in other countries as a “human rights abuse that contributes to economic hardship,” in the words of a State Department document published last year.
Let’s listen to ourselves. State legislators must understand that child marriage is devastating in Niger and Afghanistan — and also in New York and Florida. It’s past time to end child marriage right here at home.
May 26, 2017
Op-Ed Columnist
Anna Parini
Nicholas Kristof
When she was a scrawny 11-year-old, Sherry Johnson found out one day that she was about to be married to a 20-year-old member of her church who had raped her.
“It was forced on me,” she recalls. She had become pregnant, she says, and child welfare authorities were investigating — so her family and church officials decided the simplest way to avoid a messy criminal case was to organize a wedding.
“My mom asked me if I wanted to get married, and I said, ‘I don’t know, what is marriage, how do I act like a wife?’” Johnson remembers today, many years later. “She said, ‘Well, I guess you’re just going to get married.’”
So she was. A government clerk in Tampa, Fla., refused to marry an 11-year-old, even though this was legal in the state, so the wedding party went to nearby Pinellas County, where the clerk issued a marriage license. The license (which I’ve examined) lists her birth date, so officials were aware of her age.
Not surprisingly, the marriage didn’t work out — two-thirds of marriages of underage girls don’t last, one study found — but it did interrupt Johnson’s attendance at elementary school. Today she is campaigning for a state law to curb underage marriages, part of a nationwide movement to end child marriage in America. Meanwhile, children 16 and under are still being married in Florida at a rate of one every few days.
You’re thinking: “Child marriage? That’s what happens in Bangladesh or Tanzania, not America!”
In fact, more than 167,000 young people age 17 and under married in 38 states between 2000 and 2010, according to a search of available marriage license data by a group called Unchained at Last, which aims to ban child marriage. The search turned up cases of 12-year-old girls married in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina, while other states simply had categories of “14 and younger.”
Unchained at Last was not able to get data for the other states. But it extrapolated that in the entire country, there were almost 250,000 child marriages between 2000 and 2010. Some backing for that estimate comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, which says that at least 57,800 Americans age 15 to 17 reported being in marriages in 2014.
Among the states with the highest rates of child marriages were Arkansas, Idaho and Kentucky. The number of child marriages has been falling, but every state in America still allows underage girls to marry, typically with the consent of parents, a judge or both. Twenty-seven states do not even set a minimum age by statute, according to the Tahirih Justice Center’s Forced Marriage Initiative.
A great majority of the child marriages involve girls and adult men. Such a sexual relationship would often violate statutory rape laws, but marriage sometimes makes it legal.
In New Hampshire, a girl scout named Cassandra Levesque learned that girls in her state could marry at 13. So she set out to change the law.
A legislator sponsored Cassandra’s bill to raise the age to 18, and researchers found that two 15-year-olds had recently married in New Hampshire, along with one 13-year-old. But politicians resisted the initiative.
“We’re asking the Legislature to repeal a law that’s been on the books for over a century, that’s been working without difficulty, on the basis of a request from a minor doing a Girl Scout project,” scoffed one state representative, David Bates. In March the Republican-led House voted to kill the bill, leaving the minimum age at 13. (Legislators seem willing to marry off girls like Cassandra, but not to listen to them!)
New Jersey lawmakers passed a bill that would make their state the first in the country to ban marriages of people under 18, but Gov. Chris Christie this month blocked the legislation. New York legislators are considering a bill backed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to raise the age to 17, from the current minimum, 14.
Opponents worry that raising the age will lead to out-of-wedlock births, and they note that many underage marriages are consensual.
Globally, a girl marries before the age of 15 every seven seconds, according to estimates by Save the Children. As in Africa and Asia, the reasons for such marriages in the U.S. are often cultural or religious; the American families follow conservative Christian, Muslim or Jewish traditions, and judges sometimes feel that they shouldn’t intrude on other cultures.
Johnson, the former 11-year-old unwitting bride who is now fighting for Florida to set a minimum marriage age (there is none now), says that her family attended a conservative Pentecostal church and that other girls of a similar age periodically also married. Often, she says, this was to hide rapes by church elders.
She says she was raped by both a minister and a parishioner and gave birth to a daughter when she was just 10 (the birth certificate confirms that). A judge approved the marriage to end the rape investigation, she says, telling her, “What we want is for you to get married.”
“It was a terrible life,” Johnson recalls, recounting her years as a child raising children. She missed school and remembers spending her days changing diapers, arguing with her husband and struggling to pay expenses. She ended up with pregnancy after pregnancy — nine children in all — while her husband periodically abandoned her.
“They took the handcuffs from handcuffing him,” she says, referring to the risk he faced of arrest for rape, “to handcuffing me, by marrying me without me knowing what I was doing.”
“You can’t get a job, you can’t get a car, you can’t get a license, you can’t sign a lease,” she adds, “so why allow someone to marry when they’re still so young?”
Those are precisely the reasons marriages for even 17-year-olds are problematic, according to Fraidy Reiss, who founded Unchained at Last to fight forced marriage and child marriage. Bullied by their parents into marriage, she says, girls may feel powerless to object — and fearful of telling a judge that they don’t want to wed. If they try to flee an abusive marriage, they are turned away from shelters and may be treated as simple runaways.
Some judges and clerks intervene on behalf of young girls; others do not. Reiss says one clerk told a 16-year-old bride: “Don’t cry. This is supposed to be the happiest day of your life.”
“For almost all of them,” says Reiss, “marriage means rape on their wedding night and thereafter.” Reiss, now 42, says she was forced into a marriage at age 19 by her ultra-Orthodox Jewish family.
Lyndsy Duet, now a school counselor in Texas, told me that she was forced into a marriage at 17 after enduring a series of rapes beginning when she was 14, by a young man her conservative Christian family had taken into the house. Confused, shamed and helpless, she didn’t speak up — but her rapist did.
“He asked my parents if he could marry me,” Duet remembers. “My mom was crying, she was so happy.”
Duet felt powerless to resist her parents’ pressure — and it was eight years before she could flee what she says was a violent marriage. Once, she says, her husband threatened her with a chain saw, and it was only when she went to college on her own and proved a brilliant student (she graduated first in her class) that she was able to escape.
“Most girls who reach out to us love their families,” Reiss says, “and their primary concern is that they don’t want their families to get into trouble.”
The United States has denounced child marriage in other countries as a “human rights abuse that contributes to economic hardship,” in the words of a State Department document published last year.
Let’s listen to ourselves. State legislators must understand that child marriage is devastating in Niger and Afghanistan — and also in New York and Florida. It’s past time to end child marriage right here at home.
https://nytimes.com/2017/05/26/opinion/ ... he-us.html
The story itself may be disgusting, but your attempt to spin the story to take a shot at the right is equally disgusting. "No not Muslims, Red state American Christians, aided and abetted by Republican lawmakers". WOW!!! That sounds like something that should be on the cover of the Toronto (red) star. The first story is in Florida. Not even in the bizarro world is Florida a red state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_state ... lue_states
Florida is one of three PURPLE states, meaning that it has been carried by each party twice in the last four elections. Its a battleground state. Its full of old yankee (blue state) blue hairs that moved there in retirement. Florida probably has a higher rate of social security recipients than any other state in the nation. Attempting to paint Florida as a major republican stronghold is laughable, and pathetic. The article mentioned several women who were forced into early marriage. Two of them were Christian, one was Jewish. You failed to mention the Jewish one in your title. Why is that? The article claims that 250,000 child marriages took place in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010. I do not see any statistics supporting how many of these marriages were Christian. Do you? You want to single out Christians in your attack, but for all you know they may be less than 1% of these marriages. You have no facts, no statistics yet you choose to single out Christians. The vast majority of those marriages could be Muslim for all you know. The fact is you don't know. Do you? You singled out Americans. The article did not specify how many of these marriages are between Americans, did it? The vast number of these marriages could be by non Americans, couldn't they? Hey don't let something as insignificant as facts get in the way of a sensationalist story. Aided and abbeted by Republican lawmakers eh? Your words. The article states that 27 states do not set a minimum age. Lets look at those 27 states shall we?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_ma ... ted_States
Count them up for yourself using that map that I provided for the red vs. blue states. I count 11 red states vs. 16 blue states when it comes to states that do not set a minimum age for marriage. So your whole theory about evil republicans selling their young daughters off for marriage is seen for the crock of shit that it is.
The article gives us the number of 250,000 child marriages under age 17 over a ten year span. The article cherry picks 3 girls that come in at shocking ages like 11. ( I wholeheartedly agree that there should be criminal charges brought in these cases. The law states that one cannot be forced to testify against their spouse, thats where it ends. Other family members COULD be forced to testify. Everyone else CAN be forced to testify. The wife CAN testify against her husband if she chooses to. The fact that a molester married his victim did not have to be the end for these cases. The parents could have been charged with neglect. If they were facing a 50 year term, I am sure we could get their cooperation against the molester. This was laziness on the part of the prosecutor.) How many of these marriages were from 16 year olds? We don't know. The fact of the matter is that 16 year olds can get married in Canada.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canad ... -of-canada
Here we have an article from 2014 setting the national age for marriage in Canada at 16. It states that the minimum age for marriage in some provinces was 7. It was called the zero tolerence for barbaric cultural practises act. It was proposed by the conservatives and sounds like something that any right winger would get in line for. We all know what it was aimed at, the elephant in the room: Islam. I wonder how many left wingers spoke out against the measure calling it racist and intolerant. Any restrictions on them is cruel and intolerant. Pointing out short comings of Christians is fighting the good fight. Sounds like a bunch of hypocritical bullshit to me.
Tricks @ Tue May 30, 2017 5:38 am
Shocker, all religions are complete and total garbage. Whodathunkit.
BeaverFever @ Tue May 30, 2017 7:51 am
Look at the info graphics in the OP The child marriage states corrrespond pretty closely to red states
$1:
The search turned up cases of 12-year-old girls married in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina, while other states simply had categories of “14 and younger.”
...Among the states with the highest rates of child marriages were Arkansas, Idaho and Kentucky.
. Red states, and not exactly epicentres of Muslim settlement ...Among the states with the highest rates of child marriages were Arkansas, Idaho and Kentucky.
$1:
In New Hampshire, a girl scout named Cassandra Levesque learned that girls in her state could marry at 13. So she set out to change the law.
A legislator sponsored Cassandra’s bill to raise the age to 18, and researchers found that two 15-year-olds had recently married in New Hampshire, along with one 13-year-old. But politicians resisted the initiative.
“We’re asking the Legislature to repeal a law that’s been on the books for over a century, that’s been working without difficulty, on the basis of a request from a minor doing a Girl Scout project,” scoffed one state representative, David Bates. In March the Republican-led House voted to kill the bill, leaving the minimum age at 13. (Legislators seem willing to marry off girls like Cassandra, but not to listen to them!)
A legislator sponsored Cassandra’s bill to raise the age to 18, and researchers found that two 15-year-olds had recently married in New Hampshire, along with one 13-year-old. But politicians resisted the initiative.
“We’re asking the Legislature to repeal a law that’s been on the books for over a century, that’s been working without difficulty, on the basis of a request from a minor doing a Girl Scout project,” scoffed one state representative, David Bates. In March the Republican-led House voted to kill the bill, leaving the minimum age at 13. (Legislators seem willing to marry off girls like Cassandra, but not to listen to them!)
I think that the above is self explanatory. So you think this is because the child marriages are Muslims and Republicans love muslimoand are trying to impose sharia law? I think it's pretty clear who the political clients are.
$1:
New Jersey lawmakers passed a bill that would make their state the first in the country to ban marriages of people under 18, but Gov. Chris Christie this month blocked the legislation. New York legislators are considering a bill backed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to raise the age to 17, from the current minimum, 14.
Christie = Republican
Cuomo = Democrat
Need I say more?
I did notice the ONE Jewish woman, but Iif you pay attention you'll notice it says she was 19 at the time of her marriage. She's mentioned because she's the founder of the organization Unchained at Last that os trying to stop child marriages.
As for your Canada comments:
First understand that in Canada, age of consent (for marriage and most other things) is provincial jurisdiction, not federal so saying that there is no national law is a red herring. That said, Section 2.2 of the federal Civil Marriage Act explicitly states: "No person who is under the age of 16 years may contract marriage"
16 is also the legal age for consensual sex with any partner. Marrying your rape victim doesn't exonerate you from statutory rape charges in Canada.
Second, understand that outside of marriage laws, Section 293.2 of the Criminal Code states "Everyone who celebrates, aids or participates in a marriage rite or ceremony knowing that one of the persons being married is under the age of 16 years is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.
Thos particular group thinks it should be 18 because brides not old enough to sign lease, etc. get trapped. Ok fine. But what we're really talking about in this forum is brides age 10 and 11, etc. who are under the age of sexual consent.
Next let's address the supposed Muslim agenda and the former conservative governments failed attempt at at the anti-Muslim "barbaric cultural practices" legislation. The law failed and was ridiculed because it did not outlaw anything that isn't already illegal. It's already illegal to murder someone. We don't need a second law to say its super double illegal for a Muslim to murder someone. We don't need a law that says "if you see someone getting murdered call 911 but if they're Muslim call the barbaric cultural practices tip line".
As I've shown marriage is already regulated without this stupid bill and when you see the embarrassing 9th place finish of that bill's chief proponent, Kelly Leitch, 'in the recent conservative leadership race with a campaign built around similar themes, you'll understand why her Canadian political career is now over for good. Maybe you can repurpose her south of the border to root out all the barbaric cultural practices of the Christiani religious right and purge all the pervs and pedos from the Republican voting base. That's something I'd supprt!
BartSimpson @ Tue May 30, 2017 8:23 am
Tricks Tricks:
Shocker, all religions are complete and total garbage. Whodathunkit.
This isn't just about religion.
What the article fails to tell you is that Sherry Johnson is in her 70's and that this episode occurred sixty years ago.
It also fails to tell you that she is black and that underage marriages in the black community were endlessly common in that period. Underage sexual assault is disproportionately represented and under-prosecuted in the black community even still.
Also, this story is supporting a book that was released four years ago. This is not news.
martin14 @ Tue May 30, 2017 8:34 am
Always fun to watch BF pushing his "I HATE AMERICA" agenda, and then getting his ass
completely owned by the resident Americans.
![[popcorn]](./images/smilies/popcorn.gif "Eating Popcorn")
BeaverFever @ Tue May 30, 2017 8:48 am
Oh right I forgot, Black lives don't matter.
Sorry, everyone.
As you were.
Not.
Also I wouldn't even stand by the claim that is something specific to the African American community...not that it would matter if it were true anyway
Lastly from what I can tell Johnson was married in 1972, which if true would only make her 56 at most.
Thanos @ Tue May 30, 2017 8:56 am
If it isn't an important issue then why would a big dump like Chris Christie not sign off on making it illegal in New Jersey, if he didn't want to offend what he thought was a religious group that could have some influence over his political fortunes? 
As for the rest of it, well, whatever. If female genital mutilation was a Christian practice instead of a Muslim one I doubt we'd hear very much about it from the same folks who go into a panicked frenzy at the mere sight of a woman in a hijab.
BartSimpson @ Tue May 30, 2017 9:09 am
BeaverFever BeaverFever:
Also I wouldn't even stand by the claim that is something specific to the African American community...not that it would matter if it were true anyway
Thank you for admitting that you don't care to let truth factor into your political screeds.
Second, as I am looking at the reviews on Amazon it would seem that there's some controversy over whether or not this is a true story or if it's fictional. Seems that Sherry conflates her story with the fictional "Destiny" in the book.
https://www.amazon.com/Forgiving-Unforg ... B00BLP1BCO
In short: The whole thing might be bullshit.