The country has seen hundreds of thousands of child marriages since 2000. As activists push for new laws, an unlikely cohort stands in their way
Courtney Kosnik was 16 when she met the man who would become her husband in a Detroit coffee shop. She thought she’d met her savior. She was living in poverty, under the care of an alcoholic mother who struggled to hold down jobs. He promised her stability. Two months later, he proposed.
No one in Kosnik’s life seemed bothered by the fact that the man was 28, more than a decade older than his bride-to-be, and he had a plan to get around her status as a legal minor: They just needed her mother’s permission to wed, and if she didn’t give it, they could always drive down to Ohio, where the rules around marriage were less strict.
Kosnik’s mother didn’t need much convincing. The man seemed polished and friendly, and he said that he could provide a “better moral upbringing” for her daughter. “Isn’t it crazy that someone wanted to give their wife a ‘moral upbringing’?” Kosnik, now 47, said. “I should have already been raised before I got married.”
On their wedding day in 1993, 10 guests watched a teenage Kosnik marry her adult fiance. Most of the man’s family made appearances, with one notable exception. “His uncle was a priest who married every single one of their family members for decades, but he would not consent to marry us because of the age difference,” Kosnik recalled.
I realized there was no way out
Courtney Kosnik
Any hopes Kosnik had of a better life with her husband were dashed on their wedding night, when he became physically violent for the first time. “Almost instantly, I wanted out of my marriage,” she said. But her husband controlled all their finances and kept a close eye on who she spoke to. When she tried to file for divorce six years into their marriage, he took their first child out of state, saying he wouldn’t come back until she changed her mind.
They stayed together for 24 years and had four children, separating only after Kosnik was able to secretly obtain her first credit card. She used the $5,000 credit line to pay for a divorce attorney.
Kosnik now understands that her marriage as a child should never have happened. Last year, she joined Unchained at Last, a group of child marriage survivors from across the country who successfully lobbied Kosnik’s home state of Michigan to outlaw the practice in September.
However, child marriage, which activists describe as one or both parties entering a union while under age 18, remains legal in 37 US states. There are no federal laws against it, meaning minors can marry, with parental consent, before they can vote, drink, or buy lottery tickets in the majority of the country. Some states have a minimum marriage age on the books, which ranges from 15 to 18. Four states – California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Mississippi – do not specify any minimum age at all.
Reiss, who founded Unchained at Last in 2011, grew up in New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and was forced by her family to marry a stranger at age 19. It was a forced marriage: even though she was an adult, she didn’t consent to the act. The United Nations categorizes all child marriage as forced marriage.
Reiss ultimately defied the community, divorcing her husband and receiving an education at Rutgers University. She later became a reporter for the Asbury Park Press and private investigator at a financial and risk advisory firm.
Reiss and the survivors who campaign with her are known for their dramatic activism; the women go to state legislatures wearing wedding dresses and chains to symbolize their trauma. Thirteen states, plus the US Virgin Islands and American Samoa territories, have banned child marriage since 2017, in large part due to the survivors’ efforts. Some bans are stronger than others. In 2019, Utah raised its marriage age from 15 to 16, which Unchained at Last categorizes as “weak”. Other states, such as New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, completely ended child marriage, meaning it’s illegal for anyone to marry under the age of 18, regardless of parental consent. In April, Virginia became the first state in the south to ban child marriage; Washington and New Hampshire also passed bans this year.
Unchained at Last is the largest and best known US advocacy group, and in 2018 it partnered with Equality Now, an organization that advocates for women and girls, to create the National Coalition to End Child Marriage. Its goal is to end child marriage completely in the US by 2030. Along with state-by-state actions, they hope to address the practice at federal level. For instance, US immigration law does not specify a minimum age to petition for a foreign spouse to be the beneficiary of a spousal visa. Tasneem’s husband earned a green card through marrying her, which she believes was at least one motivating factor for him.
“If marriage had been illegal, in my case, my perpetrator may not have married me,” she added. “The laws incentivized him to continue to abuse me.”
Reiss says that representatives from every major religion have backed efforts to block child marriage, with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faith leaders testifying in support of bans. (It’s the fringe, fundamentalist sects that are against the bans, but voicing that stance “is a bad look”, Reiss said.) However, some secular organizations have argued against the coalition’s efforts: in California last year, local chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood came out against a law that would have banned child marriage in the state. “They see it as a reproductive rights issue, that the ability to decide to get married is an issue of choice,” Syrett, the historian, said. The law did not pass because, according to the Los Angeles Times, these organizations exerted influence over Democratic lawmakers.
The ACLU did not respond to a request for comment. Jennifer Wonnacott, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, told the Guardian that the organization “agrees that coerced and forced marriages are a human rights abuse and strongly supports protecting minors from abuse of all kinds.”
Wonnacott added: “We strongly believe in and support safeguarding the ability of young people, including those pregnant or parenting, to make personal decisions that are right for their own unique circumstances, particularly those concerning their sexual and reproductive health.” In other words, if a 16-year-old pregnant girl wants to marry before giving birth, she should be able to.
Kosnik, the Michigan survivor, said that most of the pushback she received in her state came from more conservative lawmakers. Appropriating the language of the reproductive rights movement, they argued that a young girl should have the “choice” to get married, citing various scenarios: what about a pregnant teen who wants to marry the baby’s father? Or a girl whose slightly older boyfriend is about to deploy overseas?
They also attempted to turn the law into a culture war issue: the Michigan state senator Jim Runestad unsuccessfully tried to slip a ban on allowing minors access to puberty blockers into the law, while the state representative Matt Maddock used a transphobic slur to drive the point home. “The same people who put [trans issues] in elementary schools and libraries are suddenly hyper-moralistic about 17 year old High School Sweethearts getting married, I don’t get it,” he said in a statement sent to the local outlet Michigan Advance.
“This is not about young love,” countered Reiss. “That’s bullshit.”
Republicans have likewise latched on to the idea that allowing child marriage will decrease the frequency of abortions. That’s the reason a ban on the practice has stalled in Missouri. The state representative Hardy Billington, an opponent of the ban, told the Kansas City Star: “My opinion is that if someone [wants to] get married at 17, and they’re going to have a baby, and they cannot get married, then … chances of abortion are extremely high.” The state representative Jess Edwards of New Hampshire, who voted against the ultimately successful ban in that state, argued that teens are of “ripe, fertile age” and marriage could be an alternative for abortion. He asked: “Are we not in fact making abortion a much more desirable alternative, when marriage might be the right solution for some freedom-loving couple?”
Kosnik describes lobbying these politicians as making her feel like she was speaking to “people from the 1950s”.
“It was all very, very old belief systems that don’t show where we are today,” she said. “It doesn’t give women any agency over their bodies.”
When Michigan banned child marriage in September, raising the minimum age to 18, Kosnik and her fellow survivors watched the senate vote in the galley. They were careful to sit in a section that would be in full view of the senators they’d spent two years lobbying as they walked up to vote.
“It was powerful,” Kosnik said. “It was the first time in my life that I felt like I had actually taken back control.”