00:00Hundreds of thousands of children are being married in the United States and some of these children were as young
00:06as 10.
00:07Until this week, California laws had no minimum age for marriage. Now that's about to change.
00:13People are shocked to know that child marriage, which is a problem around the world, also is a problem in
00:18the United States.
00:19California has become the 18th state to ban marriage under 18, but across the U.S., child marriage remains legal
00:25in 32 other states.
00:26Age at marriage is set, for better or worse, at the state level.
00:31So it's not like the federal government can just pass a law, as other countries have done, to say no
00:36more marriage before the age of 18.
00:38Here in the U.S., we need to go state by state.
00:41Freddie Rees is the founder of Unchained at Last, a nonprofit leading the fight to end child and forced marriage
00:47across the United States.
00:48We at Unchained at Last have collected marriage certificate data from across the United States.
00:55This was never done before. Nobody had any sense of how often child marriage was happening in the United States,
01:02and we changed that.
01:03Between 2000 and 2021, there were about 315,000 minors entered into marriage here in the United States.
01:12Child marriage is often seen as a problem elsewhere, but until 2018, it was legal in every U.S. state.
01:18I think another thing that legislators do not realize in the states that have not yet been child marriage is
01:24that they're imagining these scenarios where there's a girl who's in love and maybe she's pregnant and she wants to
01:31get married.
01:32Researchers found that at least one in five child marriages involved age gaps or circumstances that might otherwise have been
01:38prosecuted under U.S. statutory rape laws.
01:41The overwhelming majority of minors who married were girls, most often marrying adult men.
01:46When someone is forced to marry, their own parents almost always plays a crucial role in facilitating it.
01:53Parental consent often is parental coercion.
01:56California's new law takes effect in January 2027, but despite growing momentum, child marriage remains legal across most of the
02:03U.S.
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