End child marriage in the United States

Since 1997, the Tahirih Justice Center, a national nonprofit organization, has served women, girls, and other immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other forms of gender-based violence. We have always taken a holistic approach to this work because we know that survivors need much more than legal support for their individual cases. They also need supportive social services to ensure they are able to pursue safety from a position of strength, and, increasingly, they need public policy advocacy to shape the systems that support their pursuit of safety and justice.

Advocates at Tahirih have historically focused on the federal government, lobbying Congress and executive departments like USCIS, because this is where immigration policy is made.

As Tahirih grew, the policy landscape also shifted around us. State legislatures have always been in charge of policy around issues impacting survivors’ day-to-day lives: family law issues around marriage, divorce, and custody; transportation policy including the provision of drivers’ licenses and other IDs; education and housing policy; and law enforcement policy are all primarily handled by the states. But states have also leaned more directly into immigration policy over the last decade, for better and worse.

While this shift happened, Tahirih began to learn the ropes of state-level policymaking for another reason entirely. In 2016, our Forced Marriage Initiative launched the national campaign to end child marriage. When Tahirih first started working to end child marriage in the United States, in 2016, it was legal for adults to marry children in every single state. Over the next decade, following the lead of survivor-advocates, Tahirih worked state by state to protect children and ensure no one has to enter into a marriage they aren’t ready for. Since we started this work, 36 states have enacted restrictions on child marriage and 15 states plus Washington, D.C. have fully banned the practice.

Tahirih has had a role in every one of those state-based reforms, whether starting and leading the campaign ourselves, supporting survivors, advocates, and legislators who have taken the lead in their own states, or inspiring and reforming campaigns through our constant media engagement and comprehensive and accessible research on the issue of child marriage in the United States.

Our work on forced and child marriage has shown us, time and again, how focusing advocacy on the most vulnerable can deliver important wins that benefit everyone. While Tahirih’s work on forced marriage was borne from our focus on immigrant survivors, the impact of our campaign to ban child marriage reaches well beyond immigrant communities. Over 300,000 children from all backgrounds were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018, subjecting them to the known lifelong harms that impact American women who marry underage including negative physical, economic, social, and mental health consequences.

We have had the privilege of working alongside survivor advocates from all backgrounds to ensure the abuse they survived will never happen to another girl.

The age that an individual can get married is set by state governments. so running this campaign for the last 10 years has enabled Tahirih to grow the expertise, coalitions, and staff capacity needed to engage in significant state-level legislative advocacy on this and other issues.

As the national child marriage campaign gathers its own momentum, Tahirih is well-positioned to meet the moment and broaden our state-level advocacy to meet the needs of all Tahirih clients, no longer focusing solely on the issues of forced and child marriage.

In the last few years, we have developed an internal framework for engaging in state-level advocacy across all our issue areas. We’ve trained staff across our offices in how to engage their state legislators and local coalitions, and have begun to advocate in earnest for the needs of immigrant survivors in all our service areas.

Links:

• On May 10, Texas House to Vote on Child Marriage Ban