I was kind of surprised to see that while I had my head down in working my real job this afternoon that the bill that would have helped stop legalized sex trafficking failed in the state senate this afternoon.
Did I say legalized sex trafficking? What am I referring to? Senate Bill 156, of course. The measure that proposed to increase the minimum age for marriage to 18 failed on the Senate floor on a vote of 16 for the bill, 19 against.
19 members of the State Senate are ok with this? Really?
Many of the same people who want to demand that every effort be made to ensure that people are 18 and older before they can download apps on a cell phone are just fine with that same 16 year old girl getting married to a 45 year old man? If a 35 year old man is exchanging nude pictures with a 16 year girl, he’s going to go to prison for a while. But, if he marries that same young girl and starts having kids, a majority of the Senate is perfectly ok with that arrangement? Am I missing something? Because typically the older man – and almost always an older man – is not the one who ends up with the bad end of the stick in this deal.
Let me give you a real-life example. My grandmother.
My grandmother was an Iowa girl with an indomitable will growing up in Waterloo Iowa in 1930. She was not going to be told what to do, and one weekend she and her 22 year old boyfriend decided they were going to drive over from Iowa to Illinois to get married. She claimed she was 18. Nobody verified anything at the time, because this was a long time before electronic records. And on the 28th of December in 1931 my grandmother Lanore became a 16 year old bride. From what family stories note, the families were displeased once this came to light, but, what were they going to do? They were married.
A year later, grandma was giving birth to one of my aunts. By the time she was 22, she’d had three kids, with much of their marriage spent with a husband who joined the military and ended up overseas for much of WWII. In time the war was over and married life continued, what seemed like a good idea when she was 16 left her divorced at age 34 with three kids.
She got married again right away in 1950. But in a story that was never mentioned for many decades, the two youngest including my mom ended up living down the street with neighbors, as the new husband didn’t have an interest in the three kids that came along with the marriage. For better or worse, possibly for the better, he dropped dead of a heart attack leaving this once child bride not just divorced but also widowed by 35. The daughters still there were able to come home.
Thankfully, things stabilized with a third marriage a few years later to the person I and my cousins always grew up knowing as our grandfather. But the whole point is that despite some who try to say that’s what we did “way back when,” child brides could still bounce around from crappy situation to crappy situation, with a chunk of that burden coming back on the kids. It wasn’t abusive to my knowledge. But by the same token, it’s not something that any of us would refer to as “good.” Child marriage is not something that should be romanticized.
Yet, here we are, nearly 100 years later after my grandmother did it, supposedly 100 years better educated and more enlightened. And we still have people fooled by some illusion, whether hypnotized by religion or weirdly romanticized notions of the past that try to find justifications for marrying off 16 year old girls to older men like they are Irish Traveller brides.
There is not one of us who would say we don’t want to protect our kids. But as noted above, in the same breath, coming out of the same people’s mouths there are just too many who say kids should not be exposed to certain scandalous ideas in high school libraries, or have a remote possibility of looking at naughty pictures on-line, yet they are happy to cast a vote saying it’s ok that a 16 year old girl should be able to get married to their 29 year old boyfriend…. because they have a license from the state that says it’s somehow ok?
As one study noted, Some 60,000 marriages since 2000 occurred at an age or spousal age difference that should have been considered a sex crime. In about 88% of those marriages, the marriage license became a “get out of jail free” card for a would-be rapist under state law that specifically allowed within marriage what would otherwise be considered statutory rape.
People might think I’m using girls as an example too much. But look at the statistics. There really aren’t roving packs of cougars out trying to marry 16 year old boys. Of the child marriages that take place, 86% involve minor girls to 14% boys.
And if you listened to the testimony in committee, once they get into those situations and they try to escape, state laws make it near impossible for them to get out. A 16 year old typically can’t go to a women’s shelter. They cannot enter into a contract with an attorney to initiate a legal proceeding, because they’re a minor. Even better, many times minors who leave home to escape from an abusive spouse or impending forced marriage are typically considered runaways.
If you want to go read a good reference at what South Dakota just voted to continue to do to our daughters, the website Unchained at Last has more information than you might have ever wanted to read on the type of child-trafficking that the State Senate voted today to allow to continue in South Dakota.
We can do better for our daughters. And today, we should have.
