Why It’s Still Legal for Underage Girls to Marry in the U.S.

Most Girl Scouts spend their time learning survival skills and selling cookies. But Cassandra Levesque, 18, spent her last year in Girl Scouts drafting and then campaigning for a bill that would raise New Hampshire’s minimum marriage age from 13 to 18.

Under New Hampshire law–as in most other U.S. states–minors can marry as long as they have parental consent and a judge signs off. “Every girl dreams about what their wedding is going to be like,” says Levesque, “but some girls are having a wedding that they never dreamed of. They’re being put into relationships that they’re not ready for.”

Last year Levesque contacted her state representative Jacalyn Cilley about the teen marriage laws in New Hampshire and began drafting a bill to reform the law. In January, Cilley introduced the bill to prohibit all marriages under 16. The bill was later amended to abolish marriages for people under 18, before it was defeated by state house Republicans in March.

Representative David Bates, who led the campaign against the bill, argued that it was important to preserve the option for legal teen marriage in a few key scenarios, such as when a teenager is pregnant and wants to marry the father of her child, or when a teenager is serving in the armed forces and wishes to marry before deployment. Bates said that since 17-year-olds can join the military, “there is no way our legislature is going to tell [them] they’re old enough to risk their lives for our country but they’re too young to get married.”

in the U.S., nearly every state allows at least some people under age 18 to marry–and as the columnist Nicholas Kristof recently pointed out in the New York Times, the vast majority of those underage spouses are girls.

According to data compiled for the Times by a child-marriage-abolition group called Unchained At Last, more than 167,000 people under age 17 married in 38 states between 2000 and 2010. And according to data collected by the Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy group for women and girls fleeing violence, 27 states set no true minimum age for marriage, and nine states set age limits below 16.

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