This is not strictly about age, people.
Though the text you cited is exactly about age :dubious:
Perhaps 12 would be the age that triggered that outrage. But this Child Marriage – Shocking Statistics - Unchained At Last website suggests that people just don’t really care enough to change those laws or fire those judges. Massachusetts actually had a 14 married sometime between 2000 and 2010. Kentucky had a 10 year old married. Washington state had a 13 year old married.
Now, I think adolescent romance between adolescents or a 16 and a 18 year old to be relatively natural and fine. But a 10 year old being married strikes me as the sort of thing that should be changed. That’s a fifth grader! :eek::eek::eek::eek: But, if that’s these people’s culture who am I to judge?
Yep, some religions are fine to dump on around here.
Did you miss the part about creating protections to prevent coercion?
The following is pure speculation.
My guess is that those who oppose the more restrictive language do so because of fear of abusive parents. The fear is that a girl might be trying to get out from under the thumb of her abusive parents, and her best option might be to marry her boyfriend, and an impartial judge might agree with her. But her parents, seeking to maintain their control over her life, would object to this.
A further subtext, is that a common example of abusive parents, or “abusive parents”, might involve religiously conservative parents, with the girl looking to break free of this and move on to a more free and easy lifestyle. In this scenario, the parents would be looking to maintain their control over her life and keep her in this enforced religiously repressive situation.
My guess is that this is at the root of the “religious conservative group vs others” dynamic here.
But we are talking about 16-17 years old here.
Who on the right isn’t?
Or choker.
Egg-zactly.
In the US it is not unusual for a 12 year old girl to be able to get pregnant and give birth.
I am not sure we should connect when a girl can get married to when she can get pregnant. I realize you were not saying it necessarily should be that way but I am suggesting that connection should not be made at all.
That’s possible. My suspicion is a little different: that folks who would require a judge’s approval consider that enough, that there are a vanishingly small number of cases where the judge approves but the parents don’t, and that they consider this to be a symbolic gesture not worth delaying the law over.
Further, I’d suspect that in the very few cases where things go down like this (teen says yes, judge says yes, parent says no), there’s something weird enough going on between teen and parent that the parent’s judgment might be flawed.
But it’s speculation on my part as well. Does anyone have any stats how often a child gets married with the approval of a judge but against the parents’ wishes? Does anyone have an example of a marriage like that?
I have no examples or stats but I would speculate that a child would need to be legally emancipated from his/her parents to get married without their consent if the child is under age 18 (or whatever the law specifies).
Yeah, but I don’t get that part. It seems to me it should read “raise the minimum age to 18 OR create laws to prevent coercion of underage girls.” If you raise the age limit, you’ve addressed all the issues she had.
But we don’t need to sever the connection completely in order to deal with that special case anymore than we already deal with the case that 16-year-olds are allowed to drive but 12-year-olds are not. We recognize that there is a significant difference between 16-year-olds and 12-year-olds. So, the case of the pregnant 12-year-old is not relevant.
We are not requiring 16-year-olds to marry if they get pregnant. We are recognizing that, often, there are no good options and marriage might sometimes be the least worst.
Yeah, I’m not really seeing the outrage here. Granted, I’m coming from a cultural background where the tradition is to delay marriage until both parties have their first graduate degree, but… I find it hard to swallow that some people on this board think that marrying at 18 is just fine but marrying at 17 is RAPING CHILDREN OMG11111
This seems like a pretty good article, focusing on similar legislation which just passed in that fundamentalist redneck hellhole, New York. NY just raised the minimum age for marriage with judicial approval to 17 from 14. Between 2000 and 2010, 3850 people under 18 married in New York, so clearly this is a thing that happens even in the enlightened North. The article cites research showing that marrying under 18 is correlated with various poor life outcomes (remember, correlation is not causation). I would be very interested to see the data on outcomes from marriage at other ages; I would be quite surprised to learn that outcomes for those married at exactly 18 were significantly better than those married at 17.
So yes, marrying young is generally a bad choice, but people have the right to make bad choices, and we shouldn’t be so quick to judge decisions made by people in situations far removed from our own. It seems to me to make more sense to have a “gray zone” of ages where parents and judges have a say than to pretend that people suddenly go from being “children in need of protection” to “adults fully capable of making all their own decisions” on their 18th birthday.
That’s absolutely disgusting. Many villains in that story, but the thing that really outrages me is that she couldn’t get into a domestic violence shelter because she was a minor!
I would much rather see the state focusing on making sure people have the resources to get out from under the consequences of making bad decisions, rather than trying to outlaw making bad decisions in the first place.
If the parents were worth a shit, instead of forcing their child to marry the abuser, they’d shoot his sorry ass to pieces.
And then use the “He needed killin” defense.