samedi 14 avril 2018

Child marriage laws in the United States

//Mods - I thought we had a discussion about this already but I couldn't find it, so please feel free to merge/delete/move as deemed necessary if there was one.//

So child marriage has been in the back in the news here in the old US of A in the last few months so...

Basically the general age of marriage in the US is 18 which is more or less the defacto "Age of Adulthood" in the US. Two states have slightly higher age requirement for marriage, with Nebraska's at 19 and Mississippi at 21. So that's not that crazy.

But, and here's where the weirdness and ickyness start, almost all states have some exception written into laws where people can get married at a younger age (ranging from 17-13 with about half the states not codifying a specific lower age in law) in cases of pregnancy, emancipation and/or parental or judicial permission with the exception granted ranging from pretty much any judge to the state Supreme Court level. One state, New Hampshire, still has different legal standards for males and females. Males can get married at 14 with parental consent, females at 13.

But that is just what is legally possible and plenty of places have laws that are "technically" creepy and to be honest these laws aren't that far off the European Unions laws which also have a 18 year old age of marriage with each individual member state having slightly lower ages only similar special cases.

Unsurprisingly the vast majority of underage marriages are girls. And only a tiny percentage are between two children so.... yeah adult men marrying girls is really what this is all about on a statistical level.

And also unsurprisingly this is most common in American deep south and seems to have a lot of religious motivation behind it.

So the numbers.

//Caveat. Unless otherwise noted I will use "marriage" only to refer to marriages which are legally recognized by a secular government. Things like purely religious marriages, cults, arraigned marriages, and marriages in places where there really isn't a fully functioning government and marriages is handled on a tribal/religious level, etc are their own thing//

- Near as I can tell New Hampshire's 13 year old limit for females and the 23 states that don't have a limit is... pretty much the lowest codified legal limit for marriage age I can find anywhere in the world.

- The youngest marriages I can find reputable reference to in the "recent" is 3 cases of 10 year old girls getting married to men in their early 20s in 2001 in Tennessee. Which is just... ewwww.

- Roughly 200,000 people under the age of 18 have entered in a legal wedding contract in the US in the last 15 years.

So.... why? What's the purpose of this? Is this really something we need anymore? Does the "Exceptions" clauses on the marriage age really need to be a thing these days?

Is there some valid reason for this I'm missing?


via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2IR5s35

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