I always associated child marriage with Kansas because about a decade ago this guy from Nebraska went to Kansas to marry the 14-year-old girl he got pregnant and then acted all shocked when Nebraska arrested him on his return.
I hope the ten-year-old groom was a typo, but the article says a judge approved the marriage and that judges don't need to approve marriages for those over fifteen. If I'm reading that correctly, there could still be a typo, but it doesn't seem likely that the typo is substituting a '2' for a '1'.
True story: I had a roommate who married his former high school teacher.
True story: my high school soccer coach just friended me on Facebook. Startlingly, we appear to be roughly the same age.
I didn't even had a high school coach.
I'm guessing lots of the 16 and 17yos marrying guys in their 20s in NJ are Chasidic. A judge wouldn't bat an eyelash at a pair of very religious people applying for a license, with no citizenship issues involved etc.
Regardless of age, the judge shouldn't be making eyes at people who want to get married to other people.
There's a fair number of Chasidic-looking people around my neighborhood, but the young mothers don't see that young. Maybe the hair-covering thing adds five years. Maybe I don't know what Chasidic looks like.
Aha -- the author is from Lakewood, NJ. Largest Chasidic community in the country. Very, very shady local government. School system currently being taken over by the state.
Here she is talking about her own forced/arranged marriage.
For the longest time, Reiss says, she was told the outside world was a terrible, unhappy place and that the Orthodox way of life, including the marriages, was superior.
At least they got it half right.
The link in 12 is interesting. Thanks for finding it.
I do think that the religion and ethnicity/immigration angles are tough ones here. They can be both stumbling blocks that cause people to potentially mis-attribute what's going on (it's because of their religion! or maybe just plain old misogyny) but also may prevent judges or others from appropriately scrutinizing the case in front of them.
I do think that the religion and ethnicity/immigration angles are tough ones here. They can be both stumbling blocks that cause people to potentially mis-attribute what's going on (it's because of their religion! or maybe just plain old misogyny) but also may prevent judges or others from appropriately scrutinizing the case in front of them.
Location. Location. Location. In 23 years of practicing family law, I do not recall these issues ever coming up. (Outside of a few 15/16 year olds marrying their older bfs to avoid legal trouble.)
I am certain that where I practice has a lot to do with it. (Not tons of immigrants, other than recently from El Salvador.) But I can't even recall reading about these kinds of issues in Virginia courts.
The author's email is on her nonprofit's webpage - one could ask what they think of the possibility.
15: Virginia is for lovers, not marrying.
14.last: Right. I was mulling over in my head whether the immigrant communities in NJ (South Asian, African) where "arranged" marriages are a thing would receive more or less scrutiny. I can see it going either way, à la: "Crazy foreigners! What are they up to! Citizenship scam!" or "Who the hell knows what these people do?! Approved!"
"That's a really mature-looking ten-year-old. Approved!"
Actually, I knew a girl in high school who had an arranged marriage. There was a guy she was promised to -- and had been for a while, but they didn't marry them until they were out of school. She was Greek.
She got married while in a sorority?
18: I think Orthodox Jews, specifically, in the Northeast at least, might hit a sweet spot of "Who the hell knows what these people do?" combined with "They're a perfectly normal part of the local community", which might get them more "Yeah, you do whatever, I'm not getting into it" than another group might.
19: I really don't get the 10 year old one. Do the judges have to meet the people involved, or are there just forms that cross their desk? Is there an administrative law clerk who just stamps lots of these forms all day "Pakistani names, sure sure sure"? Oof.
Eventually, they will meet their natural enemy: a judge that rides a bicycle.
23: I would guess the typo explanation is right and the kid was really 15. Which doesn't exactly answer all my questions, but what can you do?
22: Right, that's what I was thinking in 8 -- a part of the community, no citizenship issues, a certain recognition and acceptance of the "sure, they get married at 17."
I dated a girl who later had an arranged marriage. She was a shitty Muslim at the time, which makes for a lot of fun. Now she's a more serious Muslim and her daughters are getting up to the same hijinks she did, much to her distress.
Possibly the 10-year-old marriage is explained by a judge who spent too much time listening to folk music?
27: This is your round-about way of confessing that you are dating multiple teenagers?
As I might have mentioned, my grandmother was married off when she was nine, and my grandfather was a good twenty years her senior. Long happy marriage!
There are some safeguards against abuse in place in a lot of communities that have practices like this--the girl's family can come beat you up and take her back, or even kill you in some circumstances--but mostly I think she was lucky that he was a decent guy and they got along.
But it's not like our laws are all that enlightened. It's basically "has definitely hit puberty" and off you go. If we were serious about protecting people from their own naivete, or preventing abuse, people couldn't marry until 25 or so.
Not to put too fine a counterpoint on it, or to get too censorious, and I don't mean to run down New Jersey specifically when it provides so many other opportunities, but is there really any depravity that we would be astonished to learn has been visited upon children?
If we were serious about protecting people from their own naivete, or preventing abuse, people couldn't marry until 25 or so.
Do I go around trying to prevent you from earning a living!?!?!
My folks had several volumes of The Story of Civilization, by Will and Ariel Durant. As a kid I read that Ariel was 15 when she married Will and that she had roller-skated to the wedding. Double-checking her obit, I find that she was 15, Will was 28 and had been her teacher, and she roller-skated from Harlem to NY City Hall for her wedding. They were married 67 years.
30: all the same, I think we've headed in the right direction by getting away from a model where the only safeguard you have is hoping that your parents sell you to a nice paedophile.
My first ancestor in VA married an eleven year old girl, even though eight months earlier he had a wife in England. Allegedly, the wife died on the sea crossing.
That's an impressive feat of rollerskating -- seven miles or so on city streets.
At least the girl didn't wind up with a philosopher.
I think we've headed in the right direction
Ah, the noble seeds of imperialism. As it happens, it turns out Iranians have agreed over the years, although "pedophile" is probably not right, given the cultural context.
I remember that Kansas/Nebraska story. I thought that Nebraska was ridiculous for prosecuting the guy. They'd gotten married for real with parental consent on both sides and the guy was raising the kid he'd had with the 14 yr old, who seemed relatively happy. How was prosecution a better option.
Even then, you wouldn't consummate a marriage to a nine-year-old right away, would you?
(Don't answer that if I wouldn't like the answer.)
25. Is marriage at 15 still legal anywhere in the United States, let alone 12 or 10, even if the victim appears to consent? I mean Jerry Lee Lewis is 80 now! Surely if a judge goes through the pretence of marrying such a child, whatever ensues is still child abuse and the judge is party to it and should do jail time.
The British government has recently become relatively proactive about this issue, under a lot of activist pressure: here's why.
Arranged marriage where the parties are adult and consenting is a whole nother issue. The issue is establishing consent.
42: Because "I'm willing to marry her" doesn't seem like it should be a "get out of jail free" card for a statutory rape charge.
(Don't answer that if I wouldn't like the answer.)
I don't know the answer.
I agree that "pedophile" isn't the right word because of cultural context and all.
Also, it's a little complicated. Assuming we're going to continue our 400 year tradition in the US of supporting intentional communities of religious weirdos and extreme cultural pluralism, there are going to be people who do arranged marriages for teens or have marriages under 18, even if these are only "marriages" under cultural practice and not state law. Making sure that these people are also married under the civil law gives the younger spouse a bunch of advantages with regard to property and support if the marriage fails that you wouldn't get if the marriage isn't recognized by law.
43. In mediaeval and early modern Europe, where the aristocracy frequently married children to each other for dynastic purposes, it was understood that the marriage should not be consummated until the girl reached menarche (Oh, wow!), which was usually assumed to be around 15 or 16. This isn't to say it didn't happen, but if it clearly did and the husband was an adult, he would pay a penalty in clear social disapprobation. I have no idea what goes on in Chasidic and fundamentalist Christian, LDS and Muslim circles, because these are recent developments historically, and pretty much pathological.
Yes. I was thinking of that as an analog.
I have no idea what goes on in Chasidic and fundamentalist Christian, LDS and Muslim circles...
Me either, except that they are probably worse in New Jersey than elsewhere. Once you keep a religious minority from pumping its own gas, it goes off the deep end.
Same thing happened in Oregon where the Indian guru was driven to bioterrorism.
51: Switching a zero for a five isn't a common typo. Those aren't next to each other on the keyboard, nor look alike (so that you might miss the exchange in a quick scan).
Huh. I have no idea why I addressed that to 51. Now there's a typo.
Obviously, you're a big government type who wants to remove the freedom of all Americans to pump their own gas.
I'll grant you that switching a zero for a five isn't a likely typo. But, it could be the typo was in the year of birth and it could have been hand written. Writing '1994' so that it looks like '1999' isn't that hard.
That's as good of an explanation as I've got.
Aaah. I'm talking about marriage for people born after I finished college.
Fortunately, I'll never had to deal with the idea that people born after I finished graduate school are now old enough to be married. ABD is forever.
58. Don't know what you're worried about, I have a friend whose grandson is married with a kid.
I'm completely comfortable with you being old.
There are people I went to high school with who are grandparents. I think they all involve at least one birth by an unwed mother.
I am six times a great-aunt, which I find disturbing when I think about it.
Especially since it's just the one baby.
by an unwed mother
When my aunt was widowed, that was the end of the last marriage in my kinda-extended family. Counting my parents and aunt, and down through the cousins, there are lots of long term relationships, but not a single marriage. Sorry, Will.
But, the men in my family do tend toward the late blooming. If I live to a typical age, my grandfather's birth to my death will cover something over 150 years.
Here's to hoping most of that time is spent in the middle parts.
I am six times a great-aunt, which I find disturbing when I think about it.
A great-great-great-great-great-great-aunt? You're moving around very briskly for a woman of your age.
"Out of the Great Sea to middle parts I have come. In this place I will abide, and my heirs, unto the ending of the world"
I probably missed a "Great" in there. Even with late marriage, there are probably more than three generations between me and the Famine.
My grandfathers were both born over 135 yrs ago. About the age of FDR or Douglas MacArthur. Eleven generations back to the first of my male ancestors on this continent, who was born about 1614.
Although they seem to mostly have data for New Jersey. Is New Jersey known for wildly isolated communities with bought judges?
Does New Jersey have one of those municipalities that is 100% ultra-orthodox Jews, or are those all in the Hudson Valley?
My paternal grandfather was born in 1872, if I remember aright, a year either side at most. He was 40 when my dad was born, and my dad was 39 when I was. As a kid I found it counter-intuitive that I had friends whose grandfathers were born in the 20th century.
That's about the same for me, but I'm twenty years younger. I was born after my paternal grandfather died and have no memory of my paternal grandmother.
73: The story of Lakewood is nuts. The school district is completely in shambles because (and this was legal, incidentally) the ultra orthodox folks on the board (everyone) diverted most of the budget to bussing kids to private schools (yeshivas in NJ and Brooklyn). (In NJ, school districts have to pay for this.) So the kids in the public schools (poor black and hispanic kids whose parents couldn't afford to move) don't have books. There is a very well appointed public school for cognitively and physically disabled children, but students need to be specially admitted to it. At the time the Asbury Park Press wrote about the whole thing, no non-orthodox student had ever been admitted.
I know it sounds too crazy to be believed.
Here's the main article on the complete school system clusterfuck.
Yep, oud, and life is SUPER great for the kids in foster care there. Or, well, not at all.
Ahh. Here is the relevant bit:
"In the coming school year, the school board plans to spend an estimated $30 million -- or about a quarter of its $133 million budget -- to subsidize the education of nonpublic school students, the vast majority of whom attend private Hasidic religious schools. There are now 85 such schools in Lakewood, with another eight set to open this summer.
That outlay doesn't include $12.5 million in tuition to send 130 disabled students, virtually all of whom are Hasidic children, to the School for Children with Hidden Intelligence, or SCHI.
The highly regarded private, non-sectarian special-education school has catered primarily to the Hasidic community since it opened in Lakewood in 1994. As of two years ago, the district had yet to place any minority students at SCHI, whose tentative state-approved tuition rate for 2012-13 is $90,773 per student. District officials say that's no longer the case, but they could not provide any further details."
Leaving aside the horror of this, "School for Children with Hidden Intelligence" sounds like something Storm teaches at.
IFAIK child marriages in all societies that practice it are actually consummated after menarche, with social opprobrium for those who violate this norm. In some countries with widespread child marriage (I'm pretty sure India) the child remains with his/her parents and only moves in with the in-laws after menarche. Child marriage in unstable places like Afghanistan is often to secure the safety of a child (daughter is much less likely to be kidnapped or raped by strangers if she's married), or by poor families who basically sell their daughters to support the rest of their family. I do know women from conservative Muslim countries who were married at 13 and very happily married 20+ years later. While I don't condone child marriage at all, I do think that the nature of a marriage relationship is one place where cultural relativism applies, as a companionate marriage based on romantic love isn't actually very common worldwide and is relatively recent in the West.
Semi-arranged marriages are still pretty common in rural China, where the parents pick someone and the kid ok's them. The kid can reject 1-2 people before the family gets a negative reputation in the village and the kid is considered too picky. I knew one woman who'd had a fully arranged marriage which she had initiated. She was 26 and well beyond marriageable age, so she had her parents pick a spouse for her, whom she agreed to marry regardless. She met her husband once and then married him 12 days later. When I met her she had been married for 8 months, was 7 months pregnant, and seemed reasonably happy, though her husband was gone most of the time.
in Florida in 2001, charges were reduced to a misdemeanor when a 17-year-old married the 13-year-old girl expecting their second child, and he received six months' probation.
This was the craziest part of the article.
I don't believe a New Jersey judge authorized the marriage of a 10-year old child. Is this even remotely credible?
84: Hee. We don't know that one was in NJ, do we? It's awful but -- especially a boy 10yo! Either a form was stamped unwittingly, or there was a typo. No one knowingly approved this. Anywhere!
We're making an informed judgement that it was in NJ.
I told you they get up to some weird shit in Jersey.
Florida 10-yr-old would make a memorable twitter feed
I'm picturing a very precocious Cartman going before the judge - "Damn straight my dick gets hard. My old lady can't get enough of it Want to watch?"
82: I've talked to female tech coworkers of Indian extraction who were planning arranged marriages, of the parents offer/ young adults get a veto style. They were mostly horrified by the USian "starter marriage". (As was I, thinking of specific other coworkers we were sort of pointedly not gossiping about. ) I still don't know if they expected their husbands to be chaste, and I remember being surprised that they expected their in-laws to be major emotional support even in the States; twenty years on the latter makes a lot more sense - support or threat, one or the other.
Also, twenty years in, reverting to the Pikettyish economic grind, family connections as worldly support make more sense again. Alas.
Nirad Chaudhuri's famous Autobiography of an Unkown Indian describes his coming around to asking his parents to arrange a marriage for him. Made the process seem decent and civilized, and he was a brilliant, educated man and the wife chosen was a graduate already in her mid-twenties. Another marriage that lasted the rest of their lives.
Poking around on that organization's website, it looks like they do allege Virginia has a problem:
Virginia allows 16- and 17-year-olds to marry with "parental consent," and allows younger children to wed with such "consent" if they are pregnant or have a child. The Tahirih Justice Center retrieved marriage-age data there and learned 4,474 children as young as 12 were married in Virginia between 2004 and 2013. Eighty-seven percent of them were girls.
93:
I've just never run across it in my area of the Commonwealth. I just would have thought in 23 years I would have had a case, had a co-worker have a case, heard or read about a case, or run across it in the courthouse. Maybe I have, but I cannot recall a single one. Perhaps Northern Va, or Tidewater is different. But it just seems like there would have been more problems resulting in more appeals. Either in criminal cases or domestic.
I'm surprised it was only 87% girls.
The fact that it's allowed in the first place sounds like a problem for Virginia, though. I guess 16/17 with parental consent isn't too big of a deal though. I did know someone in high school who was married by the time he was a junior. (On a related note I also knew fairly sheepish person in high school who was divorced by the time he was a senior, so I don't know that it was a great idea.)
Oh, I wasn't doubting you, will -- I think it's a bit sketchy that they didn't actually spell out what percentage of the "children" were 16- and 17-year-olds. I'm fully willing to believe that (assuming the VA data is accurate) there were a tiny handful of actual children and then some older teens, such that you would never normally hear of a case because 17 doesn't read as THAT much weird than a 19-year-old getting married.*
I think the bigger issue is that maturity is a continuum, not a switch, and yet public policy basically requires that we have some switches set up. Given that, a lot of our switches are still pretty arbitrary. Sixteen to operate a dangerous machine that can kill you or others; 16 for consensual sexual relationships with similar-aged peers; 18 for voting and signing legal documents; 21 for buying alcohol...we don't really have a coherent philosophy going on here.
*I frankly admit that my personal flinch would be pretty similar for a 17 y/o getting married vs a 19-year-old. Both just seem statistically way too likely to end in misery for me to be joyful if someone I knew announced such a marriage.
Having said that, I do actually know three women who got married at 19 or 20. I would not want to be in their marriages, but only one of them end up with an abusive jerk.
s/b that much *more* weird
s/b ended up
I hate being sick. I hate chicken soup. I am so done with this stupid cough.
An older study of teen marriage in the US (pdf)
From the Chicago Tribune:
"According to records at the Texas Department of Health, Liset was one of nearly 60 girls in that state who married in 2002 at the tender age of 14--the minimum age in Texas with parental consent. (A handful of other states sanction extremely early marriages with parental consent: In Alabama, South Carolina and Utah, girls can marry at 14; in New Hampshire it's 13; in Massachusetts and Kansas, 12.)
arranged marriages, of the parents offer/ young adults get a veto style
This would be our next door neighbours, who seem happy enough after about 25-30 years. Their eldest son, however, married a woman he met at university, with the enthusiastic buy-in of both families. A problem with arranged marriages of this type, which I otherwise have nothing against, is that in the culture our neighbours emerged from (Kashmiri) they tend to exacerbate the already entrenched prejudice in favour of cousin marriages, since if you're being offered a spouse by your parents, you tend to favour candidates who are already friends, and wider family is where you find friends growing up. Our neighbours are first cousins, they have three kids who are all fit and above average intelligence, and I think they're quietly aware that they've been a little bit lucky.
On the other hand, some of my cousins are hot.
Nowt wrong wi' marryin' cousins, as long as everybody doesn't do it all the time.
Anybody can marry a cousin. Casual dating of your cousins, now that takes skill.
Kissing cousins.
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When did Slate start putting up a paywall for their regular articles, not just the Slate Plus or whatever it is? I just hit my 5 for the month limit. Mind you I'm not complaining, just curious.
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You read more than five Slate articles a month?
104: Only for ip addresses outside the States.
112 Ah that explains it, thanks. I suppose a VPN would take care of that but if I ever want to read Slate that badly please someone shoot me in the face.
Agreed. But I'm not excluding shooting you in the face for reasons of my own.
Don't tell people in advance that you are going to shoot them