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The vision of a child bride is a deeply foreign concept to most Americans. Underage marriage is regarded by most as an abroad problem, or the type of detestable horror committed by isolated malcontent cult leaders, later to be turned into a true crime documentary one laments over with their friends.
But child marriage remains legal in the majority of U.S. states, and getting rid of it has proved supremely difficult.
Thirty-four U.S. states still permit a child under the age of 18 to marry — usually with the consent of their parents or a judge. Four states — California, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Oklahoma — establish no minimum age for a minor to enter into a binding legal and social contract. According to a new report from Unchained at Last, a nonprofit advocating for the end of underage marriage exceptions in the United States, and Equality Now, a gender equality nonprofit, over 314,000 marriages involving minors — most between the ages of 16 and 17 — were registered over the course of the last two decades.
Over 80 percent of those marriages involved a girl who was underage (some as young as 10), and most of those marriages were to adult men. The organization’s report found that in that same time frame, over 60,000 of those marriages involved a child that was not legally old enough to consent to sex with their spouse.
In many cases, these laws are exploited by the adult spouse as a cover, and legal mechanism, for sexual abuse against a minor. “Child marriage strips children of their bodily autonomy and freedom, legitimizes statutory rape and child sexual abuse under the guise of marriage, and exposes them to coercion that they lack the legal capacity to resist,” the report reads. Advocates argue the U.S. has not only a moral, but also a legal obligation to end the practice.
“In the U.S., because we have this federal and state system, it’s meant we’ve had to go state by state in all of our advocacy work, and we can’t just impose a federal ban on child marriage,” Anastasia Law, North American program officer at Equality Now, tells Rolling Stone. “Unlike other countries, where you are just working at the national level, a huge sticking point in the advocacy is that it means it’s going to take a really long time.”
Law says that part of the problem is that the United States is one of an ever-shrinking minority of nations that does not explicitly enshrine sex equality in its constitution. “If we did, then it would open the door for a federal child marriage ban,” she says. “It would open the door for comprehensive abortion protections at the federal level. It would open the door for all of these fixes to women’s legal issues and women’s rights issues that we’re seeing today.”
Several attempts have been made to end the practice at a federal level, most recently by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill). The so called “Child Marriage Prevention Act,” authored by Durbin – which failed to advance in the Senate — was widely criticized by advocates given its allowance for underage fiancé and spousal visas. “While the U.S. has long worked to address child marriage internationally, our federal government has failed to take meaningful steps to address this issue in our own nation,” Durbin said in a statement provided to Rolling Stone, calling child marriage a “scourge” that the government needs to take “meaningful action” to end.
In the meantime, laws that would protect children, primarily young girls, from entering into marriages before they are legally able to vote, drink, smoke, make independent medical decisions, or sign onto any other legally binding contract (like hiring a divorce lawyer) remain a states’ rights issue. This isn’t to say that lawmakers — even those in traditionally conservative state legislatures — aren’t trying to implement protections. They’re not having much success.
In 2024, an effort to raise the minimum age of marriage to 18 failed in West Virginia after Republicans on the state Senate’s judiciary committee voted down the legislation, despite the bill having passed the House with landslide bipartisan support. Getting legislatures to agree to any form of restriction can be an uphill battle. In 2023, Wyoming Republicans reacted with outrage over a legislative effort to raise the minimum marriage age to 16, arguing that the statute should remain open to any minors who became pregnant. The bill ultimately passed.
In some cases, the arguments against child marriage bans veer into the barbaric. In New Hampshire, where an underage marriage ban was enacted in 2024, one Republican state representative argued that underage marriage was a “legitimizing option” for girls of “ripe, fertile age” who became pregnant before adulthood. In Missouri, a Republican-authored ban was opposed by members of the same party, with one member of the GOP arguing that eliminating child marriage would increase incentives for the pregnant child to seek an abortion.
In 2020, Minnesota passed a child marriage ban as part of a sprawling package of progressive legislation under Democratic Governor Tim Walz. “I think they might have passed it even in 2019 unanimously, but I couldn’t get a hearing in the Senate,” Minnesota state Sen. Sandy Pappas, a Democrat, says of her efforts to pass the legislation.
Pappas recalls colleagues of hers who referenced “Romeo and Juliet” exemptions — laws allowing two underage individuals to marry each other — asking her why lawmakers would “stand in the way of a Romeo and Juliet romance” between two young people.
“And my response was, ‘Yeah, how’d that end?’” Pappas says, in reference to the double suicide of the Shakesperan lovers.
Perhaps nowhere is more representative of the struggle to convert a popular consensus into law than in Texas, where three bills looking to raise the minimum marriage age to 18 worked their way through the legislature during the 2025 regular session. All three were killed by default at the session’s end, without ever having come to a full vote despite having the necessary support.
Texas Rep. Jon Rosenthal, a Democrat representing the Houston suburbs, managed to pass legislation that would have raised the age floor for marriage in the state to 18 — without so-called “Romeo and Juliet” exceptions — out of the House and to the Senate. “Although it was going to be pretty close, I felt like there was a very good chance that I could pass it without amendment, and that’s exactly what ended up happening,” he says, adding that “it never even received a hearing in the Senate, even though there were two different state senators who had identical legislation.”
One of those companion bills was authored by Sen. Tan Parker, a Republican representing parts of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex, and the current Texas Senate Majority Leader. “It’s about stopping human trafficking. It’s about making certain that we stop child sexual abuse, and that we go after predators and predatory behavior of any kind,” he says. “We had broad support in Texas for the bill and the concept, because people recognize that predators are hiding behind the current statute.”
“Everything in our legal system — everything that we do structurally — hinges on the age of 18,” he adds. “That’s our legal structure in the country. And I just believe that marriage should be the same.”
In Parker’s view, his bill failed to receive a vote because — in Texas’ inscrutable, bonanza style legislative system — they simply ran out of time. “Sometimes it takes a couple of cycles to educate, to inform, to bring people along. … We have such a finite amount of time and a finite number of bills are going to pass,” Parker says, adding that he plans to reintroduce the legislation in a future session.
In Rosenthal’s view, however, the bills died not because of a lack of time, awareness, or interest, but an effective pocket veto from the state’s executives. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who serves as the president of the GOP-controlled Texas Senate, has “pretty much iron fist and control over legislation,” Rosenthal says. “Nothing is heard or reaches the Senate chamber floor for debate unless it’s something he personally approves of.”
“So while he never came out publicly against this thing, it was clear when it didn’t even get a hearing, even though two senators had filed the same bill,” Rosenthal adds.
The issues with underage marriage, regardless of the supposed justification provided or the age difference between the parties, are plain to see. It is linked to higher rates of divorce in the long term, higher instances of abuse and intimate partner violence, as well as more difficulty seeking and acquiring services and assistance should they attempt to escape their marriage.
“It’s almost always a minor to an adult. And specifically, the minor is a girl and the adult is a man,” says Fraidy Reiss, founder and executive director of Unchained at Last. Reiss — herself a survivor of forced marriage when she was 19 years old — stressed that the difficulty in passing state-level legislation isn’t that “the pedophile lobby shows up” to demand a bill be killed, but that even with bipartisan support, a proposed law “just doesn’t get a hearing, it just doesn’t get the attention that it needs.”
The real reason for the hesitance to pass these laws, as Reiss sees it, the a broad disregard for women throughout American politics.
“This is based on my observation, but legislators simply do not prioritize girls’ issues,” she says. Passing the laws “costs nothing and harms no one, except predators who prey on children. The only thing I can think of is misogyny, rather than this organized pushback that you would think would be the reason that 34 states still haven’t done this.”
