Child marriage is a real and persistent problem in the United States. Over 300,000 children were married in the United States between 2000 and 2018, and many cases involve an underage girl married to an adult man, not two minors marrying one another. There is abundant research on the harms of child marriage in the United States. In general, girls and young women are already three times more vulnerable to intimate partner violence and being married as a child means you are 50% more likely to drop out of high school, and 31% more likely to live in future poverty.
Moreover, a 2020 national survey found that most Americans have no idea that child marriage still happens in the United States, incorrectly believing that marrying underage is illegal across the country and only a concern in other countries. To their dismay, child marriage remains perfectly legal in 38 states and, shockingly, in our nation’s capital.
The law in Washington, D.C. allows 16- and 17-year-olds to marry someone of any age with the permission of just one parent, a loophole that has resulted in some startling cases in the District of Columbia. The process in D.C. allows anyone to walk into a clerk’s office and marry a child with just a permission slip from a parent while the child is never questioned about their interest in the marriage. By allowing children to be married with nothing more than one parent’s written permission, no oversight to ensure the marriage isn’t predatory or that the minor themselves even wants it to happen, and no residency requirement, D.C. has positioned itself as a destination for child marriages.
Washington, D.C. has yet to take up the issue and join the national wave of reforms that began across the river in Virginia back in 2016. This foot dragging has left the District increasingly isolated in the DMV as a dangerous laggard in protecting children from forced marriage and at risk of becoming a regional destination for child exploitation and human trafficking under the guise of marriage as 9 of the 12 states to end child marriage are in the mid-Atlantic and northeastern part of the country.
With 12 states having ended child marriage entirely, and every state from North Carolina to Maine taking action on the issue since 2016, D.C. must take urgent action to end child marriage. The 2022 reform restricting child marriage in Maryland and the 2024 law banning it entirely in Virginia should be a wake-up call for lawmakers that D.C. is now an outlier, endangering not only its own children but those throughout the entire DMV region.
Read the full Child Marriage in Washington DC report.
