White girl story reminds me of a lot of the U.S. Hmong youth in my generation

[theking]

Pregnant at 15, married at 16: She's speaking out to end child marriages

An estimated 300,000 children under the age of 18 legally wed in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018, according to the nonprofit Unchained at Last.


Chloe was a high school student in Idaho when she met a young father online in early 2015. They soon began dating and 10 months later, she was pregnant. But there was a problem: Chloe was 15, and her boyfriend was 22.

Chloe said he convinced her that the only way that he could avoid prison is “if we got married.”

So that’s what they did. On a cloudy day in March 2016, she married her older boyfriend believing it would shield him from statutory rape charges.

“He had researched it,” said Chloe, who was 16 at the time of the wedding and had convinced her mom to consent to the marriage. “He told me, ‘This is what we need to do. And if we don’t and I go to jail, it’s going to be all your fault.’”

Chloe’s story is not as uncommon as it might seem.

From 2000 to 2018, nearly 300,000 minors under the age of 18 were legally married in the U.S., according to a recent estimate by the nonprofit Unchained at Last, which obtained marriage certificates from 32 states and partial data from 12 others.

Roughly 86 percent of the children were girls and nearly 60,000 of the marriages involved an age difference such that the younger spouse could have been considered a victim of a sex crime.

Since 2000, the number of child marriages in the U.S. has declined each year – dropping from a high of nearly 80,000 in 2000 to just under 2,500 in 2018.

But Fraidy Reiss, founder of Unchained at Last, said even one child marriage is one too many.

“There have been days that we've gotten five calls in the same day from individuals begging, ‘Please help,” said Reiss.

Reiss’ group helps minors escape wedlock and also lobbies for legislation to ban marriage for children under the age of 18, which remains legal in 44 states. She noted that a marriage results in a legal contract that strips minors of many important rights, such as the ability to retain an attorney to file for divorce or get a protective order.

“Even when a teen enters into a marriage willingly, that still creates a nightmarish legal trap,” said Reiss.

“Because once you're in a marriage, you should have the right to get out of it. So the adult spouse at any point wants to file for divorce, retain an attorney, get a protective order, get into a domestic violence shelter, that adult spouse has those options. The minor in that marriage, they have to wait until 18.”

[Reporter]

Fairy tales of princes and princesses happily ever after make children want a taste of the grand castle early in life when they don’t yet know what it would take to uphold the kingdom.

[theking]

Yeah, true in many cases based on my observations and work experiences in the social services field..

Although not as many, even some older folks can't "uphold the kingdom" either...

[theking]

[theking]

Children raising children...