What was supposed to be a fun family trip with her siblings and father to a religious conference in Los Angeles, Sara Tasneem found her life changed instead.
At the conference, over a cup of orange juice at a hotel cafe, she met an older man that would become her husband that night. She was 15-years-old, and he was 28; 13 years her senior.
Tasneem became one of the thousands of married adolescent girls in the state of California. According to the Pew Research Center, 5.5 out of every 1,000 girls aged 15 to 17 in California were married in 2014. California has an above average number of these marriages when compared to other states.
Before she got married, she had planned to join the Air Force and work towards her goal of becoming a lawyer.
“Once I got married, that was no longer an option,” she said.
While most states have a minimum age required to be issued a marriage license, 18 states have no minimum age, where a person of any age could be married. California is one of them.
Girls aged 15 - 17 have gotten married in California between 2009 - 2017
“I definitely feel like the system as a whole failed me. It let me slip through the cracks,” Tasneem said.
Advocates of a child marriage ban say that undefined age laws like these allow young girls to be coerced into marriage.
“The loopholes are so gaping that they allow marriage at any age,” said Fraidy Reiss, the founder and CEO of Unchained At Last, a nonprofit organization focusing on ending child marriage in the United States.
According to her organization’s research, about 248,000 children in America were married between 2000 and 2010. These numbers excluded 12 states due to a lack of marriage age data. California is one of these states.
Young girls like Tasneem are married off by their families for various reasons. Situations like pregnancy, preserving virginity, or religious beliefs can all influence a family into having their daughter get married young. In Tasneem’s case, her father was part of a religious cult.
“They were marrying girls off as virgins to older men,” she said.
The Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit working on ending forced marriages in the US, found that girls were the minor partner in 87 percent of child marriages between 2000 and 2015.
In a small study done by Kristen Zaleski, a University of Southern California professor, and Alissa Koski, a McGill University professor, 4 out of the 19 girls surveyed married men who were at least ten years older.
Because California has no data collection, researchers must often infer trends from indirect sources like the American Community Survey, an annual report collected by the US Census that focuses on yearly changes.
According to the survey, nearly 9,000 girls were married in California between the years of 2009 and 2017. The national median is 845 over the same period. California has the highest number of teenagers married in America, second only to Texas.
Advocates and organizations, like Unchained at Last, have been working on changing California’s laws.
“We know from the American Community Survey data that child marriage is happening across California and girls lives are being destroyed,” Reiss said. “Let’s do something about that.”
Reiss’s nonprofit has publicly supported the pro-marriage ban decisions that have recently come out of both Delaware and New Jersey. Despite both only becoming law this year, they are the first two states to outright ban marriage under the age of 18.
Unchained at Last previously worked with other organizations to create a coalition with the goal of ending child marriage by working with California Senator Jerry Hill to introduce Senate Bill 273. The original intent was to set a hard age floor of 18.
At the time of its announcement in March of 2017, Senator Hill said in a press release “While we respect all cultures and faiths, we cannot support practices that rob the youth of their children.”
However, by April 24, 2017, the bill was rewritten to remove the age floor. The compromise included safeguards such as requiring the parties to the marriage to undergo an interview with Family Court Services before a judge approves of the union.
The bill will also instate the appropriate data collection necessary to track underage marriages by annually sending age and gender information collected from marriage licenses. The bill passed with these provisions on September 21, 2018.
Senator Hill couldn’t be reached for comment, but according to a press release from his office, the original bill did not win enough legislative support to pass.
Reiss’s organization believes that the bill in its current state falls too short of its original intent.
“This is a real outrage,” she said. “It would have eliminated the gaping loopholes in the marriage age law in California that allow girls of any age to marry. It puts California’s laws in line with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.”
The original draft of the bill faced criticism from prominent activist groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood. As reported by The Sacramento Bee, The ACLU has indicated in their position that the age ban unnecessarily intrudes on the fundamental right to marry.
Sara Tasneem, now a survivor of child marriage and an advocate, said the passing of the watered-down version of the bill was frustrating.
“When we went to Sacramento, the lawmakers were just like ‘well, this isn’t a big enough problem for us to pay attention to it.’”
Still, Tasneem believes the passing of the bill has been important in her work.
“Moving forward from SB 273, what Senator Hill did was put a spotlight on it. However, I think we need to find somebody who will be brave enough to take it as far as it needs to go.”
On January 1, 2019, the bill will take effect, changing marriage laws in the state. In an effort to lower adolescent marriage, the bill has added extra steps before a license can be granted.
Under the new law, minors are subjected to a required 30-day waiting period. There are a few exceptions that can expedite the process. If the person is at least 17 and has a high school diploma or is at least 16 and pregnant, they can get the waiting period waived.
Adolescents looking to marry are also required to be interviewed by the Family Court Services. Representatives of the Court then write a report to be sent for judicial review before the issuance of a marriage license.
Scott Altman, a professor of law at the University of Southern California, is unsure how this bill will change marriage.
“You’ll get mandatory reports. That will be a big change in practice. Whether we’re going to get a big change in which marriages do and don’t get permitted; it’s just not obvious to me.”
Altman sees why the law was passed as such. “I think that people that write laws like this understand that they can only be so aggressive without leading the people whose lives they are trying to improve to just run away from legal regulation altogether.”
While laws can prevent legal child marriages recognized by the government, there is no direct way to protect minors from spiritual marriages.
“The fact that you can’t get a marriage license at 14 is not going to stop you because it’s the religious ceremony that matters to you,” Altman said.
Unless somebody knows a crime is being committed and reports it to the authorities, marriages done in secrecy will continue, according to Altman.
“So what’s interesting to me is that they went through all of these changes but didn’t put in a minimum age,” Altman said. “[Lawmakers] apparently didn’t see it as a problem.”
Sara Tasneem was one of these girls coerced into a religious wedding before her legal marriage. Introduced by her controlling and abusive father to the man who would become her physically abusive husband, Tasneem felt compelled to go along with the whirlwind marriage.
“[My father] had been abusive to me the majority of my childhood, so I just never questioned what he was saying,” Tasneem said.
Marcy Hamilton, CEO of Child USA, a think tank nonprofit that focuses on ending child abuse said a large part of why child marriage still happens in America is due to our government’s deference to religion.
Child marriage isn’t the only issue, she said. She also blamed a lack of medical care and the falling vaccine rate on this phenomena.
“These come from a deference and a belief and religious liberty, but they occur at the cost of the child and the needs of the child when they grow up.”
She believes this contributed to why California could not pass a more robust bill to protect children from abuse.
“What happens to the victims in these young marriages is that their education is stunted,” Hamilton said. “The girls tend to have many more children, and that leads to very serious health concerns and health problems.”
Victims may feel compelled to stay quiet rather than get their families in trouble. The California Penal Code 265, states that it is illegal to force a woman to marry, and lawbreakers can be sentenced to state prison.
According to the Tahirih Justice Center, this has caused a “chilling effect” where minors may not want to turn their parents or families in because of the severe consequences that could be set in motion.
“You’re scared for your parents, even if they’re abusing you. You still love them and want to protect them as a kid,” Sara Tasneem said.
Michal Sela-Amit, a clinical associate professor of social work at the University of Southern California has seen the damage done to teenage girls married too early. Often girls are passed along from manipulative families directly into the care of an abusive person.
“You’re taking young girls that didn’t have a chance to develop themselves and their own voice in order to stand for their rights, into a situation of being in a domestic violence relationship.”
According to the Bureau of Justice and Statistics' report on intimate violence in the United States, girls aged 16 through 24 experience triple the national average of domestic violence. Girls aged 16 to 19 comprise 94 percent of that group.
Abuse is not just physical, and often victims experience at least two kinds of abuse during their marriage, according to the study done by professors and researchers Zaleski and Koski.
Victims may also experience abuse from other family members. “In a few instances, physical and verbal abuse came from mothers-in-law,” Zaleski said.
Financial abuse is also common. According to their small study, about 52 percent of her participants reported their finances were controlled.
Spouses and in-laws may have sole control over all the money, or victims with jobs may have to turn over their paychecks to their families. This can make leaving even more onerous for the victim.
“He controlled all of the finances, so I didn’t even have a bank account in my name,” Tasneem said of her ex-husband. “I didn’t know how to drive, so I was completely dependent on him.”
When these girls do get a chance to divorce their partners and leave, their finances still cause them trouble.
“Their financial situation is really difficult. And then these girls are usually inundated with custody of the children,” Sela-Amit said.
Tasneem was able to leave after putting herself through culinary school and securing a job. “I just told him ‘I can’t be a part of this relationship anymore, I have to separate from you,’ and it was a really, really, really difficult situation to get out of,” Tasneem said.
After having left her marriage a decade ago, Tasneem has been working to change the laws in California to prevent another child from going through a fate similar to hers. Despite what she saw as a passing of a watered-down bill, Tasneem remains hopeful.
“You know, we saw the #MeToo movement coming, and I think that really created a cultural shift where women's issues are taking the forefront of society,” Tasneem said. She hasn’t given up yet. “There’s a little bit more national movement on this, and I just hope it continues.”
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