The Progress Report: The US Says ‘I Don’t’ to Child Marriage

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Emma Varvaloucas: So hi everyone. Welcome to The Progress report. This is our Friday accompaniment to our interview series that comes out on Wednesdays, and we are here to give you all the good news that you might have missed during the week. Maybe you read some newsletters or you watch tv, or you see the news on social media, but we’re willing to make a bet with you that a lot of the stuff that gives you some inspiration, motivation, energy to move forward, to know that there are people out there fighting the good fight to make good things happen in the world.

Is it not surfacing at the top of your news? Intake, wherever that intake may look like. So that’s what we’re here to help you do. We have a great team here that helps me collect these articles and videos and podcasts from all over the interwebs, all over social media. And today I am flying solo, but Zachary will be back with us next week.

So are we ready for today? What, what totally depressing topic are we going to convince you that progress is being made today? It’s gonna be child marriage. I know it sounds, sounds really like a downer. We had a video go viral this week on Instagram, over a million views that my colleague Molly made about the progress around child marriage in the United States, and a lot of people were surprised to learn.

Actually, thousands and thousands and thousands on this video we’re surprised to learn that child marriage is still illegal in most of the United States. Now, what do I mean when I say that? Up until around 2016, it was very much so. Literally anyone at literally any age, and I’m talking in broad strokes here, could get married with, in some cases parental consent.

That all started to change around 2016, and yes, that does seem like quite a late year for all of that to start to change, but it is the truth. Several states raised their floor of a minimum age to marry to 16 or 17. Some of them are 15 and there are four states where there is still no minimum age to get married.

And if you would like to know which states those are, I’m happy to tell you it’s California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Mississippi. No minimum age to get married. You can literally be any age you’d like. So as you can imagine, that leads to some. Abusive circumstances, but even in the states where the floor has been raised to most of them it’s 16 or 17.

There are a handful where it’s 15 that can lead to some abusive circumstances and even just sometimes weird situations because of those laws. So in most of those states. Parental consent is required. The issue is some of these, it’s mostly teenagers. A lot of people when they think about child marriage maybe have an idea of their mind of 11 year olds being married off to 60 year olds in religious cults.

And that does actually still happen in the United States, although it’s rare. But a lot of these individual cases, when we talk about child marriage, are 16 and 17 year olds who their parents kind of get involved in. The legal trafficking of their children. So that means that American girls, it’s most often girls can be married off to men that are seeking legal status.

The US visa, they get married to provide that to them or vice versa. It actually allows for the legal importing of child brides from overseas, from foreign countries. It also means that in some states, let’s say this is a Romeo Juliet type situation, it’s two 16 year olds or two 17 year olds, or even a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old that wanna get married.

Even if you find that to be okay, well they’re almost, I. Of age and almost 18. Why can’t we let them do that? It can create some weird situations in some states where these teenagers are legally allowed to get married, but it’s very difficult for them to initiate a divorce because you need to be 18 to.

Be legally involved in the, the signing and getting out of contracts. So they would have to have an appointed guardian for them to represent their legal interests in order to do that. And it can get quite complicated. So that’s kind of like a big background on why it’s still an issue in the United States.

Even if the states have raised their floor to 16 or 17 years old to get married, why? Advocates are still pushing. For all of the states to make the minimum age 18 years old. And there actually has been, and this we’re finally getting to the good news, the progress portion of the progress report. There’s been a lot of action recently.

So big spurt since 2018. In 2018, Delaware was actually the first state to prohibit anyone under the age of 18 from getting married. New Jersey was a quick number two, and since then, 12 other states have joined that list. Maine was actually the latest to do so in May of this year, so this month, and in addition to those states, we also have the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, which I learned was pronounced Samoa recently.

Case anyone hears me and thinks, isn’t it American Samoa? Apparently it is not. And Puerto Rico have also raised their minimum age to at least 18 and that count is going to rise even further because bills in Oregon and Missouri have been passed in April and may respectively by the state legislatures there again to ban child marriage, raise the minimum age to 18, and those are just awaiting signatures from their governors.

So. Still a lot has been happening even within the last couple of months. Definitely within the past decade. I think a lot of people are completely unaware of these changes and if you look on a map of where child marriage is now banned in the United States, Maine’s decision to do it actually has created what they’re calling the New England wall, which is interesting as a term.

I feel like it’s, it’s normally meant to be, normally has a negative connotation, but it’s, it’s. Positive in this instance, um, where essentially all the New England states have have banned child marriage. So we’ve got the New England wall. You can use that term. Tell your friends, tell your family. So yeah, lots, lots of progress on that front.

There’s also lots of energy around it in a lot of the state legislatures that have not yet successfully passed child marriage, but they’re trying to do. So. South Carolina hasn’t been trying to do this for. I think since 2020 they’ve tried to pass a bill at least three times. Three times they have failed, but they’re going for number four right now.

So lots of energy around this. And you know, we included in the progress report last week about the Take It Down act, which President Trump just signed into federal law, and that makes revenge porn essentially illegal at the federal level. So if someone shares intimate photos or video puts them up online.

Number one, that is now criminalized. And number two, as a victim, you would have 48 hours for your request to be responded to by any platform that has put up non-consensual intimate imagery or video. And I wrote an article about this back in September, 2024, not that long ago, and it was exactly the same as kind of the, not exactly, but similar to the current situation around child marriage where you had this hodgepodge of.

Different states passing laws around the issue, but there was no federal coverage, so it was just, there are always gonna be loopholes. In some states, I had absolutely no idea that the Take It Down Act was going to get passed and signed. Then if I did, I would’ve been hit on an even more hopeful note because the big caveat on that article was the lack of federal coverage.

Now we have federal coverage, so that’s just to say with a lot of these issues where. It seems like nothing is happening. Nothing is happening, nothing is happening. All of a sudden, a bunch of stuff can happen in, in the case of child marriage with a lot of states, it already has still quite a long ways to go, but a point of bringing up the example of the Take It Down act that you never really know what’s going to pop up in the future.

So for those of you that are unfamiliar with the issue, it’s, it’s a quite common one worldwide as well. I think the recent estimates are about one in five women in total get married before the age of 18 globally. I do have one more piece of small progress on that. From outside of the United States, and that is from Pakistan.

So this week I believe, oh, I’m sorry, it wasn’t this week, it was last week. So also in May, may have been a good month for this issue. Pakistan’s Capital City is Lama Bod banned child marriage. First of all, it’s a capital city, so that’s a big deal. It’s not the first place in Pakistan to have banned child marriage.

Actually, there’s one province there that had that banned child marriage about a decade ago. But advocates, legislatures are hoping that it’s going to yield future progress there because of the way that the legislatures are set up there. It required both houses of their legislature to make this change in Islamabad, which means that overall there is energy, there is agreement.

Well, I want, I don’t wanna say a hundred percent agreement, ’cause there’s always controversy when laws like this are, are up to be passed or, or to not passed. And there was lots of vigorous debate and PAX in as well, but it was passed. So there’s a certain amount of agreement, enough to get bills through and they’re hoping that that’s going to create a domino effect in the rest of Pakistan.

We shall see. So that’s what we have. I know it’s a lot of information about child marriage. It’s, I just want an issue that I think it calls to mind certain ideas, but maybe people don’t have all the information about why letting 16 and 17 year olds leaves the door open for abuse and other circumstances.

So I want to give people the full rundown on that, but now I will quit talking about child marriage. I will move on to another topic. This is a fun one. The first space agency for the continent has opened up in Africa. So there are some countries in Africa with national space programs, but there is no continental agency as there is, for example, in Europe.

It’s called African Space Agency, very aptly named, headquartered in Cairo, Egypt, and its purpose is to coordinate existing national space programs. Okay, great. We love to see the coordination, but also it’s going to be launching a bunch of satellites and focusing in particular on weather data collection and its dissemination to all of the various countries in Africa.

That might not seem that exciting to you, but it is more exciting than it seems. I mean, number one, it’s great to have accurate weather forecasts just for everyday purposes for farmers, for all kinds of people that rely on weather in their day-to-day lives. But it’s also a crucial component of being prepared for extreme weather events.

Part of the reason why you see such a. Lower counts of casualties and deaths for extreme weather events in richer countries is because of these forecast systems that we know where extreme events are going to happen. For instance, where hurricanes are gonna hit to. We’re very accurate about that nowadays and when it’s going to happen, how intense it’s going to be, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Not all the African countries have access to such. Accurate data. So having that be disseminated throughout the continent. Having a space agency that’s responsible for that weather collection and that sharing is, I think, only going to improve the lives of people all over the continent of Africa. So excited to see what happens with the African Space Agency.

We’ll, we’ll keep an eye on that for sure. And last but not least, what should we do? What should we do? There’s so many. Let’s do a couple of L-G-B-T-Q wins abroad. We’ve done the US, we went to Africa. Let’s go to Europe now. So Italy’s constitutional court has ruled that two women can register as parents of a child on a birth certificate.

Previously you were only allowed to register as a parent. If you were the woman that had, were the biological mother. If you had carried that child or created that child, you’re allowed to be on the birth certificate. But if you were a partner, you had to go through a formal adoption process for you to have legal rights over your own child.

But they have ruled that it is unconstitutional to make people go through that process. And now two mothers will be allowed to both put their names on birth certificates. And one quick tour into Poland. So we’ve talked about Poland a lot on this podcast, particularly because they are one of the examples of a country that has gone through a period of democratic decline.

They really backslid up until 2024 when they had a party in power called Law and Justice, and they basically took control of the court system there and. They’re also a far right party, so very, very, very anti-gay. One of the things that occurred while they were in power is that they had a bunch of local municipalities, towns, things like that, past laws that were called LGBT, ideology, free Zones, the Ideology Free Zone.

These laws were not particularly enforceable, but it did create a climate of. People feeling very unwelcome in lots of places in Poland, and it’s not the case, for instance, in some places, like in Africa, for instance, where homosexuality was literally punishable by imprisonment or even death in a handful of extreme cases.

But still, it was just definitely a sign that the country as a whole was. Moving towards this position of being unwelcome for their gay citizens. And the, what is the progress here? You ask? This last remaining LGBT ideology free zone has been abolished. So after the Law and Justice Party got voted out in 2024, there’s been a slow unraveling of these local municipalities that have passed these zones.

Again, not enforceable, but a reminder that. Went through some questionable years in the recent past, and there’s been a lot of work being done over there. To backtrack from the trajectory that the country was heading in, in a lot of different ways around the L-G-B-T-Q community, around women’s rights and abortion around capture the court system and democratic backing, it’s been a whole mess.

It’s not been completely straightforward. Experience trying to reverse all of that. In fact, the current Prime Minister is running into a lot of roadblocks and they have an election on June 1st, which may or may not make that road easier for the Prime Minister to pass some reforms. So we’ll probably report on that based on the results in the future progress report.

But yes, a couple of, A couple of wins for the LGBTQ community over there in Europe. So that’s what we have for this week. As always, if you have anything that. You would love for us to cover if you would love for us to talk about if there’s anything that you would love for us to talk about Les. Uh, we are open to any and all kinds of feedback.

You can leave a review on any of your podcast platforms that you listen to us on, or you can write us an email at hello at The Progress Network dot org. That is not gonna go into the incident either. I actually do monitor that email, so please feel free to feel free to write in. I love hearing from listeners and so does Zachary.

So thank you once again for spending your time with us. I hope that it, at the very least, was a bright spot in your week and hopefully ending your week on a slightly more sunny note. We really appreciate you tuning in, and we hope to see you next Wednesday for our next interview and next Friday for our next progress report.

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