Child marriage is a significant problem in the United States that overwhelmingly affects underage girls who are married to adult men, often with dire consequences for their life outcomes, including physical, emotional and sexual abuse, poverty, lower educational attainment, and compromised mental and physical health.
Data shows that between 2000 and 2018, more than 300,000 minors (i.e., under the age of 18) were married in the United States, most of whom were 16 or 17 years of age. Some of these marriages included girls as young as 10 and girls who were married to men that were decades older. In addition, between the years 2007 and 2017, more than 8,500 marriage-based visa petitions involving at least one minor were approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the majority of which involved U.S. citizen men seeking to bring minor girls from overseas as brides or fiancées.
While the United States has long worked to support efforts to end child marriage internationally, our federal government has failed to take meaningful steps to address this issue in our own backyard. The Child Marriage Prevention Act of 2024 (S.4990) is groundbreaking federal legislation that represents the first concerted effort by the United States Congress to condemn and prevent child marriage domestically.
The Child Marriage Prevention Act of 2024 sends a strong message to states across our country that they must end child marriage in short order and provides incentives for them to do so by:
- Establishing a National Commission to Combat Child Marriage to study, evaluate, and report on eliminating child marriage in the United States;
- Providing those states that have already ended child marriage with increased VAWA grant funding;
- Establishing a competitive grant program for advocates in eligible states that create state-based task forces to examine child marriage and make comprehensive policy recommendations to address the issue. These grants will provide critical support to local advocates and survivors that live and work in states that have not yet ended child marriage, supporting homegrown reform movements;
- Prohibiting child marriage from occurring on federally-funded land or buildings, or property owned by the federal government (such as military bases); and
- Instructing the Attorney General to promulgate a model state statute that prohibits child marriage.
View the full Children Marriage Prevention Act 2024 one pager here.
Additional Resources:
- Full bill text available on Congress.gov: S.4990.
- Section-by-section summary of the bill provided by Senator Durbin’s staff
