California Bans Child Marriage

On September 30th, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Bill AB 1267 into law establishing 18 as the minimum marriage age in the state with no exceptions. This bill eliminates previous legal provisions that allowed minors to marry with parental consent and judicial approval, regardless of age. With this change, California becomes the 18th U.S. state to ban child marriage. The practice remains legal in 32 states.
Governor Newsom signed the bill alongside Courtney Stodden, a prominent advocate for banning child marriage in the state who was allowed by her parents to marry a 50-year-old actor when she was 16. Around 10 years ago, child marriage was allowed across the entire country; however, since 2018, increasingly more states have been reforming laws around the practice.
Before the signing of this bill, California was behind in both national and international standards. Mississippi and New Mexico are the only two other U.S. states without a minimum marriage age, and only 2% of high-income countries and 4% of low-income countries have no minimum marriage age.
California’s old laws also created concerns for those outside of the state. Federal spousal and fiancé visa requirements defer to the intended state of residence, which meant that a California spousal or fiancé visa could be approved for a child of any age, potentially allowing human trafficking to be disguised as marriage.
Unchained At Last, a non-profit focused on ending forced and child marriage, estimates that in California around 34,875 underage girls were married between 2000 and 2021. In the United States as a whole, more than 314,000 children were legally married between 2000 and 2021, including girls as young as 10.
Unchained At Last also found that, between 2000 and 2021, 86% of all children married in the U.S. were girls, with most married to adult men, and that at least 66,415 of these marriages involved a child either too young to legally consent to sex or an age gap large enough that sexual intercourse would qualify as statutory rape under state law. Before this new bill, California had a legal exception for statutory rape in instances of marriage, allowing adults to be protected from prosecution for criminal sexual activity with children.
Child marriage is an issue that extends beyond the United States. The United Nations has called child marriage a human rights violation. The negative effects of child marriage on girls are vast. Girls who enter child marriages are at a higher risk of physical, sexual, emotional, and financial abuse, unwanted pregnancies, and poor health. They are also at a greater likelihood of dropping out of school, limiting their economic and employment opportunities, and leading survivors of child marriage to experience elevated poverty rates.