28 United States The Economist February 26th 2022
ChildbridesMiserable
marriages
W
henaprilkelleywas 15 shewas
married,againstherwill,toafamily
friendsevenyearshersenior.Hedroveher
sixhoursfromherhomestateofArkansas
intoMissouri,whichthenhadlooserlaws
governingthemarriageofminors.Aprilre-
membersacountyclerkattheceremony
peeringathertear-stainedfaceandasking
ifshewantedtogoahead;shewastooterri-
fiedtoreply,sherecalls.Hermotherand
husband-to-benoddedtheirassent.
BackinArkansas,shelivedwithherin-
laws.April’shusbandwouldtakeheroutof
school at lunch break to have sex and often
kept her home, sending fake medical notes
to her teachers. He would not even let her
shower alone. More than a decade later,
April cries as she describes the experience,
which she endured for a little over a year.
After her father-in-law started acting las-
civiously towards her, she ran away.
Laws ought to protect children from
such horrors, but America’s too often do
not. Though most states have a minimum
marrying age of 18, most also have excep-
tions—generally, by the consent of a parent
or approval of a judge. Missouri is one of 14
states (as well as Washington, dc) that
gives county clerks rather than judges the
power to issue marriage licences for mi-
nors. Nine states have no lower age limit.
A push for legal reform is having some
success. In recent years at least 27 states
have passed laws to limit child marriages.
In the past four years Delaware, Minneso-
ta, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania
and Rhode Island have all eliminated the
exemptions that allow minors to marry.
Yet resistance to such reforms remains,
on both the right and the left. In 2017 an at-
tempt to set a minimum marrying age of 18
in California (which has no lower age lim-
it) failed after opposition from advocacy
groups including the left-leaning Ameri-
can Civil Liberties Union. The same year
Chris Christie, then the Republican gover-
nor of New Jersey, vetoed a similar bill, say-
ing it did not “comport with the sensibil-
ities and, in some cases, the religious cus-
toms, of the people of this state”. More gen-
erally, lawmakers have failed to press for
reform because the number of marrying
minors has fallen dramatically. In 1960,
6.8% of American girls aged 15-17 were mar-
ried; today less than 1% are.
That is still too many, say campaigners.
A study published last year by Unchained
At Last, an advocacy group, estimated that297,000minorsweremarriedin America
between 2000 and 2018, and 60,000 of
them were under their state’s age of con-
sent (for sex). Patchy state data mean this is
almost certainly a big undercount, says
Fraidy Reiss, Unchained’s executive direc-
tor. Most minors who marry are girls, she
says, and the practice occurs across all eth-
nic groups and religions. Many of the mar-
riagesare prompted by religious beliefs or
are immigration-related. Federal immigra-
tion law does not specify a minimum age
for marriage-related visa petitions.
Escaping from a legal child marriage isdifficult. Domestic-violence shelters tend
not to accept lone children, who are consi-
dered runaways; the police may try to send
them back home. Securing a divorce is also
tricky. Few lawyers will take on child
clients, even if the child has the means to
pay them. April says she called dozens of
lawyers before she found one who was so
appalled by her plight that she drew up a
simpledivorce contract for no fee.
The State Department’s “Global Strategy
to Empower Adolescent Girls”, launched in
2016, described marriage before the age of
18 as a human-rights abuse. But within
America, girls who marry before 19 are 50%
more likely to drop out of high school. “I
did my best,” says April, a college graduate
who does gig work, including food delivery
and some freelance journalism. But she
says she often wonders how much better
she would done if she had not missed so
much school. Divorcing as a minor re-
quired emancipation from her parents by
the state, making her a legal adult at 16.
She has only just begun to understand,
she says, the toll all this has taken. She
panics a lot. At 20 she had a daughter and
says that “I worry that I would have been
able to do better for her too, though she is
doing better than I ever did.” Having lived
in or near her home town for several years
after her divorce, she decided to move far
away after her ex-husband saw her with
her daughter, with whom shenowlives in
Texas. “I wanted to make surehenever set
eyes on her ever again,” she says.WASHINGTON, DC
The number of marrying minors has
fallen sharply—but not far enoughApril looks back—and aheadAcademicfreedomApushback against cancel culture
A
blog post by a self-professed liberal,
atheist 19-year-old student put culture
warriors in a spin in January. She described
her transfer from an elite, liberal-arts col-
lege to a Christian college in Michigan.
Conservatives said it showed young people
were sick of leftist indoctrination. Liberals
pointed to the fact that the student’s moth-
er was an anti-vaxxer, who boasted online
that this was the reason for the transfer.
Beyond these skirmishes, the case of
the student, Jane Kitchen, raised questions
about what good a liberal-arts education is
in America today. Ms Kitchen arrived at
Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia in 2019,
and loved much about it. But she was sur-
prised at the cultural virtue-signalling and
lack of intellectual inquiry. Even before co-
vid, “I didn’t sit around with my friends all
night arguing about big questions like Ithought I would,” she wrote. “It was as-
sumed that we all agreed on the answers.”
Because she did not want to accept a
two-week quarantine and a mask mandate
on her return to college, she spent a de-
pressed year at home, and decided to trans-
fer. Manyof the colleges operating normal-
ly were religious. Still, she took a chance
on Hillsdale, where she found an intellec-
tual diversity that she had missed. She told
a professor that she had privately objected
to a point in class but had not wanted to
seem argumentative. “Be argumentative,”
he responded. Someone on Twitter called
her move “an example of following an ide-
ology to my own peril,” she wrote. “I think
just the opposite happened; I rejected an
ideology and it set me free.”
Ms Kitchen’s tale is unusual, but it
highlights the questions that a growingSome students and academics are rethinking university education