Fighting to End Child Marriage

Child marriage is still legal in 48 states. The ongoing fight to change this for good is personal for the founder of Unchained At Last.

Transcript

00:00Forced marriage and child marriage are happening everywhere.

00:04We all need to fix this.

00:22My family arranged my marriage at 19 to a stranger who turned out to be violent.

00:27And I was trapped in that marriage for 15 years.

00:29When I finally managed to escape with my two daughters, my family shunned me.

00:33They still consider me dead.

00:35More than a decade later.

00:49In state after state, children can be entered into marriages

00:53without any say from them, completely disempowered throughout that process.

00:57And then because children do not have the right to bring a legal action in their own name in most states,

01:03that typically means they're not even allowed to file for divorce once they've been entered into these marriages.

01:19Setting a marriage age at 16 or 17 does not help.

01:22Almost all the children who marry in the United States are 16 or 17.

01:27Children don't have the rights of adulthood.

01:29They don't have basic rights to leave home if a marriage is abusive,

01:32to get into a domestic violence shelter, to retain legal counsel,

01:37to file for divorce or get a protective order.

01:53It means that a girl is much less likely to finish high school, let alone college,

01:58much more likely to end up living in poverty,

02:01faces a significantly increased risk of serious health conditions,

02:05and also really increases her risk of experiencing domestic violence.

02:22Forced marriage and child marriage are happening everywhere.

02:26There is no one community or one culture or one ethnicity that we can point to and say,

02:32that's where the problem is, they need to fix that.

02:35No, we all need to fix this. This is happening everywhere.