If you are younger than 18 in California you can’t get a tattoo, buy a Lottery ticket, or visit a tanning bed. But you can get married.
California is one of only 11 states that has no minimum age requirement for marriage.
With an OK from a parent and a judge, it’s estimated that a couple thousand minors get married in California each year — most often a younger girl wedding an older man. But weak data collection laws mean we don’t know exactly how many minors get married, or their ages, or the ages of their spouses. And activists who want to curb child marriage say that lack of data has helped sink previous efforts to ban the practice in California. With no hard numbers, opponents can simply insist it’s not a real problem.
A new bill from Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Laguna Beach, aims to fix that by requiring more regular, thorough and public reporting on underage marriages in California.
“This data will help substantiate what we know to be true — child marriage is a persistent and pervasive problem in California,” Petrie-Norris said.
Survivors of child marriage say it’s a message they’ve tried to tell lawmakers for years.
Elizabeth Sitton’s mom and stepfather raised her in a religious commune in Murrieta. When she was in eighth grade, they pulled her out of school and had her start teaching the commune’s younger children. When she was 16, they forced her to marry a 28-year-old man she barely knew.
Two years later, on July 4, 1986, Sitton and her husband made a run for it, getting out with little more than the clothes on their backs. They divorced a few years later, and Sitton spent the next several years trying to catch up on her education.
At 54, she has a masters degree from Pepperdine University and works in leadership development for a large healthcare company. But she still has physical and mental trauma from her forced marriage. So she also speaks about her experience as an advocate for a ban on child marriage.
“Now that I have a 16-year-old daughter, it’s particularly poignant for me,” Sitton said. “She’s been on one date. How is it possible that someone this age could be married?”
Sitton wrote a letter to California legislators, detailing her story, four years ago, when lawmakers were considering a statewide ban on all marriages involving people under 18. But the age limit was stripped from Senate Bill 273 — which added some rules to marriages involving minors — after pushback from, among others, the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood. Those groups argued that imposing an age limit would also limit a fundamental right to marriage. Neither organization responded to a request to speak for this story.
Some religious groups also oppose a minimum age on marriage, arguing, for example, that pregnant minors are better off getting married. And some child welfare organizations have argued that marriage can sometimes help troubled kids to get out of bad situations, such as poor foster homes.
But Rima Nashashibi, founder of the Tustin-based nonprofits Global Hope 365 and the related California Coalition to End Child Marriages, scoffed at what she termed “excuses.” She says those arguments would simply trade one problem for perhaps an even bigger one — and they carry the potential to victimize children yet again.
Data suggests marriage for people under 18 is linked to a variety of social ills. Child brides, for example, are more likely to be abused by their spouses. They also are more likely to suffer from depression, addiction to alcohol or other drugs, and to be exposed to sexually transmitted diseases, among other issues.
Often, minors also face significant hurdles to get out of forced or abusive marriages, Nashashibi said. Without an adult’s help, a person under 18 can’t hire an attorney, rent an apartment, or even check into a shelter.
Many nations, from Norway to Saudi Arabia, have banned all marriage for anyone under 18, but in the United States laws related to the issue run the gamut. Four states — New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Minnesota — ban marriage for people under 18. Most other states allow marriages as young as 16, while a couple — Alaska and North Carolina — allow marriage at age 14, according to data reported by the nonprofit Unchained at Last.
Then there’s California, which has no age limits for marriage at all.
“People think that child marriage is an international issue,” Sitton said. “But it’s actually right here, localized, in our communities.”
California has the sixth-highest number of child marriages in the country, according to estimates from the Pew Research Center. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 13,234 child marriages occurred in California during a 5-year span. And that only counted minors ages 15 to 17.
Dawn Tyree was 11 years old when her parents moved from their San Pablo, Calif. to go out of state, leaving her in the care of a 30-year-old family friend. He abused her and eventually got her pregnant at 13. The solution, concocted by her abuser and her parents, was to have Tyree and the man, who was then 32, marry.
“It was a really scary time for me,” recalled Tyree, now 49 and living on the Oregon coast. “The three most trusted adults in my life were guiding me and telling me what needed to happen. I trusted that this was the right thing.”
Tyree’s case was a clear example of a statistic Nashashibi often cites — that half of child marriages are initiated to cover an underlying crime, such as statutory rape, since sex is only legal between a minor and an adult if they’re married. Nashashibi said forcing such marriages is like taking the handcuffs off the rapist and putting them on the girl.
When Tyree was 15, and pregnant for a second time, she started working on a plan to leave. And at 16, she and her two children fled.
In 2018, Tyree testified before California lawmakers asking them to pass a law like the one Petrie-Norris is pitching today. Under Assembly Bill 1286, counties would have to report minor marriages four times a year rather than annually. It also would require the State Registrar to report the data to the legislature and online for the public.
This week, the bill passed the Assembly Appropriations Committee with unanimous bipartisan support. It’s expected to be voted on by the full Assembly later this month.
Clerk-recorders in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties said the more frequent and detailed reporting called for in Petrie-Norris’ bill would not pose any problems for them. But there were limits on the data provided in response to requests for this story.
When asked about the number of child marriages going back to Jan. 1, 2019, L.A. County provided a state chart that shows “no data” reported for 2019. Nashashibi said many counties reported data that way, making it unclear if the true answer is zero, or if they didn’t collect the data, or if they didn’t report that data to the state.
A spokesman for the clerk-recorder’s office said there were zero minor marriage in L.A. County in 2019. But he didn’t provide figures after 2019, and he said they don’t track ages of those married as minors.
Clerks recorded a handful of marriages between minors in Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties in the past two years, including one between a 17- and 21-year-old.
To try to build support for a change to state law, the California Coalition to End Child Marriages is going to cities and counties, asking local officials to back resolutions to ban marriages under 18.
The first city to pass such a resolution was Irvine, which did so in August 2020. Since then, seven other cities have passed similar resolutions, Nashashibi said, and 17 more are considering them. The efforts, she added, have drawn strong bipartisan support.
“We’re basically sending a message to Sacramento and everybody else,” Nashashibi said.
Once enough momentum builds at the city and county levels, she plans try Sacramento again for a bill to ban child marriage in California.
For Sara Tasneem, who was raised in a religious cult and forced to marry a 28-year-old man when she was 15, passage of AB 1286 — to simply beef up the data about child marriages — feels like the “bare minimum” California can do to address this issue.
“It boggles my mind that we are even having to ask this small question,” said Tasneem, 41, of El Sobrante.
“I appreciate that this is a step forward, but I also just want to see more action taken here. Because it is a human rights abuse, and it is happening around the world and it is happening here in the United States and it is happening here in California.”
Source: Orange County Register
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