Child Marriage in America | Hacker News Reader

Child Marriage in America

nytimes.com

45 pointstheprop51 comments

Johnson, the former 11-year-old unwitting bride who is now fighting for Florida to set a minimum marriage age (there is none now), says that her family attended a conservative Pentecostal church and that other girls of a similar age periodically also married. Often, she says, this was to hide rapes by church elders.

It sounds to me like she is going after the wrong thing. The problem is not the marriage. This is like, I don't know, outlawing religion because some priests are pedophiles. Go after them for the actual crime they committed. Don't mess with marriage laws just because they get misused.

No, it's nothing like "outlawing religion because some priests are pedophiles". It's more like sending the priest to another parish to obscure the fact that they've sexually assaulted children. It's just covering up the actual atrocity by having children marry their assaulter. You really think an 11-year-old being forced into marriage is not part of the problem?

You are twisting my words. Underage marriage is not always a case of an 11 year old being forced to marry her adult male rapist. What he did is already a crime. A group of people so willing to cover it up will just find new and creative ways to cover it up and excuse it. He has already broken a raft load of laws. He doesn't care and neither do the people forcing an 11 year o!d to marry him as some bs excuse to sweep it under the rug.

One additional law saying that what he did is not okay won't fix this. But outlawing all underage marriage potentially interferes with two 17 year olds getting married who actually love each other and, whoops! she is pregnant.

Hmm - I assume NH's different ages for girls and boys wouldn't stand up against a 14th Amendment challenge...

It seems so messed up that there are societies (in the US generally tiny little societies within much larger societies) in which your daughter being raped is a source of shame, but giving your daughter to that rapist makes it better.

Have to wonder what these parents think on the wedding night. Do dad and mom go home after the wedding, sit with a beer and try not to think about the fact that their daughter is being raped that very second? I suppose if they were the kind of people who'd have trouble with that, they wouldn't have handed their daughter over. I suspect they go home and feel relieved that their social group approves of them again. A happy occasion for them.

They probably don't think about it. It is a social mechanism that developed in their culture to get a man and a woman together in a social contract given an edge case. Just like we don't think about the fact that our (well my demo) mechanism typically involve (a) hitting on someone already in a relationship, (b) getting boozed up, (b) trivially entering and leaving relationships with little social cost.

I think it reasonable to judge a mechanism's efficacy and continued relevance. However judging members of a cultural regime seems misguided and (per the modern dating/relationship scene) somewhat hypocritical. (Yes people are getting raped in both regimes. No, our regime doesn't reward the rapist. Yes, both regimes are trying to affect social stability and what you see also says a lot about how that culture got there ..)

However judging members of a cultural regime seems misguided and (per the modern dating/relationship scene) somewhat hypocritical.

I think I disagree with this. Starting with the axiom "raping children is bad" (which, granted, is an axiom and not a universal truth like a law of physics), I believe it is not somewhat hypocritical to judge people who endorse this, even if I come from a dating/relationship scene in which casual consensual sex happens.

That said, I know that I do have a belief that one of the few true "sins" is the removal of personal agency from someone, and handing one's child over to her rapist is very much that; I wouldn't be surprised if I considered that action to be bad to a greater degree than others would. Still, at least I'm aware of my own prejudices in this.

You should read my remark in the sense of 'social regimes are damned difficult to resist' and it appears humans have coping psychological mechanisms for individual members to deal with these sort of collective/individual dynamics, so focusing a judgmental gaze on individuals is misguided. We should look at the larger social construct, its evolution (how it got there), and finding possible cultural pathways to guide them out of their moral culdesac.

[with p.s. to add regarding the "guiding" part: assuming our own moral condition is in fact in a healthy condition.]

Rape, imprisonment, threats, assault, etc. are already illegal. I fail to see how adding an additional law will suddenly fix these situations.

But raising the marriage age above the age of consent (like what was attempted in New Jersey) will cause real harm to people who have nothing to do with those situations. Teenagers won't be able to cover their pregnant partners under their insurance. Soldiers won't be able to get married before joining. More children will be born out of wedlock. What do democrats shout at Trump's plans to end Obamacare? "If you do this, people will die!"

The minimum marriage age should be the age of consent and not a year higher.

According to the article, more than half the states have no firm minimum age for marriage. For many states, it is below the age of consent. In some states, statutory rape is not considered such if the partners are married. It seems that the laws need an overhaul like you say, to bring in line with age of consent at least.

There is a reason why marriage age limits are frequently below the age of consent.

One of important reasons why society wants to push age of consent way above puberty age - is because society wants to prevent teenagers from having promiscuous sex and have pregnancies out of wedlock. Marriage helps to reduce both these risks. That is why marriage is allowed at a lower ages than age of consent.

And?

You said that rape is already illegal.

Children are being raped, and then pressured to marry their rapists. This means that the rapists can't always be prosecuted.

Did you read the article? They are making the case that communities are using early marriage as a way of covering up rape in places where underage sex is legal (or at least overlooked) if the person is married. Hence banning it would reduce the amount of rape going unpunished, and therefore the amount of rape.

Does it really matter if a child is born out of wedlock?

There are studies that show correlations, for example, with income and education [1]. Correlation, however, does surely not proof causation.

Personally, our son was also born out-of-wedlock and we are still not married. For us it was simply a choice of wanting children but not seeing the need to affirm our relationship through the public statement of a wedding. While in our country no one is taking offense with that, it is unfortunate that there are still negative side effects such as higher taxes and a lot of paperwork to ensure my spouse and I have the same rights and obligations with regards to our son

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/why-are...

Yes. Children with only one parent are more likely to be physically and mentally unhealthy, go to prison, not go to college, use drugs, abuse alcohol, etc. It should be obvious that children are better off when there are two people responsible for taking care of them.

How is out of wedlock the same as 'only one parent'? Can't you have two unmarried parents?

In the situation from this article, without marriage one of the parents would likely go to jail. Then the child would be raised by a single parent (a teenager).

Who, exactly, would have benefited from that?

Being born out of wedlock does not mean there there is only one parent...

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/wedlock

What is that supposed to prove?

Prove?

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/parent

I believe you are confused. This is a discussion about marriage, not parenthood.

You were the one that introduced parenthood, by conflating "outside of wedlock" with, and I quote, "children with only one parent".

You're the one who brought up parenthood. You're the one making the claim that having unmarried parents is the same as having only one parent.

The reason I asked this question is because my parents have always been, and will continue to always be common law. They love each other and raised my brother and I together.

I was born out of wedlock, and still raised by two parents.

Children with only one parent

If your two parents aren't married you still have two actual parents.

Perhaps rather than "parent" you meant "active caregiver" or similar.

You mean the USA allow underaged boys and girls to enlist as soldiers?

I've always found it exceedingly bizarre that in the US, one can enlist in the military and be prepared to kill or be killed at age 17, while even at 20, it's illegal to purchase a non-alcoholic beer. I think America is very strange.

I'm a little unclear how that's different from any of the other things US federal, state, and local law allows minor children to do with their parents' consent. In any case under federal law, the lowest age limit for enlistment is 17 with parents' consent.

What do you mean by "underaged"?

17 years old or less, I presume

The minimum enlistment age is 17 with parental consent. Underage would be 16 or younger.

>Teenagers won't be able to cover their pregnant partners under their insurance

Then maybe force insurance companies to cover partners too?

>Soldiers won't be able to get married before joining.

Then maybe they shouldn't be sent to kill and get killed before they are like 21 either? This way they have 3 full years to get married and enjoy their marriage, even after joining at 18.

wtf? U.S. isn't some 3rd world country...?

Even Vatican City has raised the age of consent to 14 for women.

1) What the author of that article calls "rape" is probably a "statutory rape" which is a very different thing than actual violent rape that most readers visualize.

2) "it did interrupt Johnson’s attendance at elementary school"

That is baloney.

Why would marriage interrupt school attendance? Sherry just used her pregnancy and marriage as an excuse not go to school. That was her choice and had nothing to do with her legal status.

3) "two-thirds of marriages of underage girls don’t last"

So what? Half of marriages do not last. Does it mean we have to ban all the marriages now?

Or, may be, we should ban employment, because employment does not last too?

How about one third of underage marriages that actually do last? Why should we ban them?

If you read the full article, this was probably actually rape, compounded by it being child rape. But I do agree that changing marriage laws doesn't really fix the situation described. The grown men raping little girls should be prosecuted for it instead of getting the girl handed over to them by the parents.

Changing the marriage laws won't solve something so deeply sick and twisted. The situation described is a case of serious local corruption. They issued marriage licenses to put an end to rape investigations. Totally messed up stuff, not easily fixed.

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