There are officially a dozen states where child marriage has been banned.
Virginia joined Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington on Monday night after Governor Glenn Youngkin signed House Bill 994 into law.
The legislation establishes the legal marrying age in Virginia to be 18 and "eliminates the ability for a minor to be declared emancipated on the basis of the intent to marry." The law closes a loophole that allowed 16- and 17-year-olds who have been emancipated from their families to wed. Advocates said that the loophole had allowed those minors to be legally trafficked under the guise of marriage.
"We are now 12 states down, only 38 to go in the push to end child marriage in the United States and eliminate a human rights abuse that destroys girls' lives," Fraidy Reiss, the founder and executive director at Unchained At Last, told Newsweek. "We at Unchained At Last and our allies will not stop until every one of those 38 states does what Virginia just did. We are pushing especially hard now in states where legislation to make the marriage age 18, no exceptions is pending, including California, New Hampshire and Missouri."
Unchained At Last is an organization dedicated to ending forced and child marriages in the U.S. It estimates that 7,876 minors in Virginia, some as young as 12 years old, were entered into marriage between 2000 and 2021. More than 80 percent of those marriages were between girls and adult men and almost all of those marriages involved a minor who was not old enough to consent to sex with their spouse.
"This is a momentous day for children in the Commonwealth, who no longer have to fear the threat of a forced child marriage," Casey Carter Swegman, the Tahirih Justice Center's public policy director, said on Tuesday. "Virginia started the national movement to end child marriage in 2016; by completely banning child marriage today, it has reasserted itself as a leader of that movement."
The Tahirih Justice Center serves immigrant survivors fleeing gender-based violence.
In 2016, Virginia passed a law that established 16 to be the marrying age. Before that, minors under 16 were allowed to marry if the relationship involved a pregnancy and the parents of anyone underage consented. Marriages were also allowed for those between 16- and 18-years-old if there was parental consent.
Delaware was the first state to set the minimum marrying age to 18 in 2018. Most states currently have the minimum marrying age set to 16, although there are a handful of states that have raised it to 17, including Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon and Tennessee.
There is no minimum marrying age in California, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
HB 994 will go into effect on July 1. The legislation banning child marriage was one of 777 bills that Youngkin signed on Monday night. The governor also amended 116 bills and vetoed 153 bills.
"As I said on the first day of this year's legislative session, in the State of the Commonwealth address, every piece of legislation I have had the honor to sign into law as Governor has necessarily been bipartisan," Youngkin said in a Monday statement. "And where there are differences in our approaches, I hope my amendments reflect the common ground we can find together."
Update 04/09/24 1:08 p.m. ET This story was updated with comments from Reiss.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Katherine Fung is a Newsweek reporter based in New York City. Her focus is reporting on U.S. and world politics. ... Read more
