It put an end to my childhood: the hidden scandal of US child marriage

[malaise]

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2018/feb/06/it-put-an-end-to-my-childhood-the-hidden-scandal-of-us-child-marriage
<snip>
In half of US states, there is no legal minimum age for marriage; a 40-year-old man can, in theory, marry a five-year-old girl. But Florida may soon ban the practice for under-18s. We meet the former child brides campaigning for change.

Sherry Johnson was 11 when her mother told her she was going to get married. The bridegroom was nine years older and a deacon in the strict apostolic church that her family attended. He was also the man who had raped her and made her pregnant. “They forced me to marry him to cover up the scandal,” Johnson says. “Instead of putting the handcuffs on him and sending him to prison, they put the handcuffs on me and imprisoned me in a marriage.”

Johnson is now 58, but child marriage is not a thing of the past in the US: almost 250,000 children were married there between 2000 and 2010, some of them as young as 10. “Almost all were girls married to adult men,” says Fraidy Reiss, the director of campaigning organisation Unchained at Last.

In most US states, the minimum age for marriage is 18. However, in every state exceptions to this rule are possible, the most common being when parents approve and a judge gives their consent. In 25 states, there is no minimum marriage age when such an exception is made. But now Johnson’s home state, Florida, is poised to pass a law that sets the minimum marriage age at 18 with very few exceptions – thanks largely to her campaigning.
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Time's Up!

[regnaD kciN]

1. To be picky...

...although, as the article notes, "in half of US states, there is no legal minimum age for marriage; a 40-year-old man can, in theory, marry a five-year-old girl," the fact is that currently, in every state, there is an age of consent between 16 and 18 years old. Therefore, while that forty-year old could marry a five-year-old, he would be subject to rape charges if he had sex with his "bride" for another eleven to thirteen years, depending on the state.

[procon]

2. This is stone age barbarism and shouldn't even be a question in 2018.

Young women and girls are not chattel to be sold into marriage when they haven't even reached the legal age of consent. I have do doubts that the adults involved in this human trafficking business are the sort who scream about Sharia law taking over Amurika, while that are practicing the same thing. What kind of "judge" would ruin a girl's life by forcing her in a marriage?