End child marriage in the United States

This year so far has been whirlwind of activity in the fight to end child marriage in the United States.

Our Forced Marriage Initiative team has been hard at work. In just the first three months of 2024 alone, we supported 120 people seeking safety from forced marriage, most of whom are children and youth between the ages of 14 and 24. The survivors we helped lived in 24 different states across the country, and came from diverse racial, ethnic, language, and cultural backgrounds. While we honor the diversity of the folks we serve, we also recognize their shared lived experiences; all of the people we helped have experienced threats, harm, or coercion, and all have chosen to fight for their right to be free to choose when and whom to marry. We are incredibly proud of the life changing outcomes that the folks we serve achieved – safety from marriages that they did not choose, freedom from violence, and access to resources to chart their own futures – as a result of their courage to work with our array of trauma-informed, survivor-centered, linguistically accessible, and confidential services.

As we celebrate the resilience and tenacity of the children, youth and other survivors we serve, we also celebrate our impact in terms of helping other service providers, government workers, and community members join the movement to end child marriage. For example:

• We led the effort in Virginia to ban child marriage: as a result of our leadership and advocacy alongside our peers and survivors, thebill to end child marriage inthe Commonwealth – once and for all – landed onthe governor’s desk and was signed into law.
• Working in collaboration with the federal Office on Trafficking in Persons, we launched the first session of a grant-funded web series earlier this year: Beginning with a presentation focused on TheIntersectionof Forced Marriage with Human Trafficking and Other Forms of Abuse, our webinar garnered over 500registrations including advocates from across the country who are interested in building their knowledge and skills to identify forced marriage when they see it, and connect survivors to aid.
• We worked to “change hearts and minds” by engaging in media advocacy: In February, our FMI Manager published her firstop-edin the Virginia Pilot calling for the end of child marriagein the Commonwealth, drawing on her perspective as a newmother and parent raising agirl child in Virginia.
• We celebrated the State of Washington becoming the 11thstate to end child marriage, an effort we contributed to throughtechnical assistance and written testimony.
• We reinvigorated the campaign to end child marriage in Washington, District of Columbia by growing our coalitionpartners,reconnecting with DC Council staff, and launching the development of a DC-focused child marriage report. We are committed to ending DC’s status as a haven and destination for child marriage in the Mid-Atlantic.

While 2024 to date has yielded incredible successes, we know more must be done. We continue to lead the movement as co-chair of Girls Not Brides USA, a group of 60 civil society organizations working to end child marriage; to act as a federally-funded national training and technical assistance provider for the Office on Violence Against Women to educate service providers across the nation on how to recognize and respond to forced marriage situations; and to continue to advocate for changes that would eliminate transnational exploitation of girls and women through the vehicle of marriage.

The work continues, and we are grateful for our supporters and partners who make our efforts possible.

Links:

• A recent Op-Ed by FMI Manager, Hellitz Villegas
• New Hampshire Raises Legal Marriage Age to 18 Without Exceptions
• Virginia Makes History as 12th State to End Child Marriage