“I can say with 100-percent certainty that a forced marriage means rape, not just on the wedding night. It’s a lifetime of rape.”
If the thought of child marriage conjures clichés of religious extremists in far-away lands, think again. Girls from every race, religion, and social class are being married off to adult men—right here in America. “I never wanted to get married but I don’t think I had a choice, he was going to get charged with statutory rape,” former child bride Brittany Koerselman tells me from her home in Pocahontas, IA. Now 23, she was 15 when she married her 21-year-old boyfriend in 2014.
Child marriage is a human rights abuse that disproportionately impacts girls, putting them in situations where they don’t have the same legal rights as their adult spouses. Some children are even forced to marry the pedophiles who abused them in an attempt to prevent those adults from being criminally charged. But once they say, “I do,” underage brides who want to flee are trapped in marriages they can legally enter, but can’t legally leave until adulthood.
According to research done by Reiss’ social justice organization Unchained At Last, nearly 300,000 children were legally married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018. Most were 16 and 17 years old, but a few were as young as 10. Despite statutory rape laws enacted to prevent adults from having sex with children, in many states men can legally transition from child groomer to groom via marriage loopholes that require very little parental or judicial intervention.
When Stodden moved from their parents’ home in Seattle to Hutchison’s home in Los Angeles after the wedding, things quickly changed. “He was very angry—just dripping with venom,” Stodden recalls. “Screaming in my face all night long. Spitting all over me, teeth up against my jaw.” Stodden’s body begins to visibly shrink back as they recount this time to me. “I would be in the corner...I couldn’t move. When I’d try to move...
Feeling trapped, the teenager started drinking. “He introduced me to alcohol,” Stodden says of Hutchison. “It was a way for me to cope and feel like an adult.” Stodden says they realized Hutchison was an alcoholic after marrying him, but by then, they saw few options to leave. “Holy shit,” they remember thinking, “I don’t have any control here. I really have none.”
“In about 38 states, what would otherwise be considered statutory rape becomes legal within marriage,” Reiss says. Since 2000, there have been at least 60,000 marriages that outside of wedlock would have been considered sex crimes. And in 88 percent of those cases, marriage provided legal immunity to the adult spouse. For the other 12 percent, the marriage is legal, but every time the couple has sex, it’s still considered a sex crime.
“I was raped at 8, pregnant at 9, gave birth at 10, and was forced to be married at 11,” Johnson, now 61, tells me over the phone from her home in Florida. “I was a mother, a wife, and a fifth grader.”Growing up, her mother worked as the assistant “church mother” and her family lived in the parsonage of their strict conservative Pentecostal church in Tampa, FL. The deacon had access to her home and would sneak into the little girl’s room repeatedly to rape her. She was eight.
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