
Child Marriage in America - theprop
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/opinion/sunday/it-was-forced-on-me-child-marriage-in-the-us.html
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Mz
_Johnson, the former 11-year-old unwitting bride who is now fighting for
Florida to set a minimum marriage age (there is none now), says that her
family attended a conservative Pentecostal church and that other girls of a
similar age periodically also married. Often, she says, this was to hide rapes
by church elders._

It sounds to me like she is going after the wrong thing. The problem is not
the marriage. This is like, I don't know, outlawing religion because some
priests are pedophiles. Go after them for the actual crime they committed.
Don't mess with marriage laws just because they get misused.

~~~
thepaulstella
No, it's nothing like "outlawing religion because some priests are
pedophiles". It's more like sending the priest to another parish to obscure
the fact that they've sexually assaulted children. It's just covering up the
actual atrocity by having children marry their assaulter. You really think an
11-year-old being forced into marriage is not part of the problem?

~~~
Mz
You are twisting my words. Underage marriage is not always a case of an 11
year old being forced to marry her adult male rapist. What he did is already a
crime. A group of people so willing to cover it up will just find new and
creative ways to cover it up and excuse it. He has already broken a raft load
of laws. He doesn't care and neither do the people forcing an 11 year o!d to
marry him as some bs excuse to sweep it under the rug.

One additional law saying that what he did is not okay won't fix this. But
outlawing all underage marriage potentially interferes with two 17 year olds
getting married who actually love each other and, whoops! she is pregnant.

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ajdlinux
Hmm - I assume NH's different ages for girls and boys wouldn't stand up
against a 14th Amendment challenge...

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EliRivers
It seems so messed up that there are societies (in the US generally tiny
little societies within much larger societies) in which your daughter being
raped is a source of shame, but giving your daughter to that rapist makes it
better.

Have to wonder what these parents think on the wedding night. Do dad and mom
go home after the wedding, sit with a beer and try not to think about the fact
that their daughter is being raped that very second? I suppose if they were
the kind of people who'd have trouble with that, they wouldn't have handed
their daughter over. I suspect they go home and feel relieved that their
social group approves of them again. A happy occasion for them.

~~~
eternalban
They probably don't think about it. It is a social mechanism that developed in
their culture to get a man and a woman together in a social contract given an
edge case. Just like we don't think about the fact that our (well my demo)
mechanism typically involve (a) hitting on someone already in a relationship,
(b) getting boozed up, (b) trivially entering and leaving relationships with
little social cost.

I think it reasonable to judge a mechanism's efficacy and continued relevance.
However judging members of a cultural regime seems misguided and (per the
modern dating/relationship scene) somewhat hypocritical. (Yes people are
getting raped in both regimes. No, our regime doesn't reward the rapist. Yes,
both regimes are trying to affect social stability and what you see also says
a lot about how that culture got there ..)

~~~
EliRivers
_However judging members of a cultural regime seems misguided and (per the
modern dating /relationship scene) somewhat hypocritical._

I think I disagree with this. Starting with the axiom "raping children is bad"
(which, granted, is an axiom and not a universal truth like a law of physics),
I believe it is not somewhat hypocritical to judge people who endorse this,
even if I come from a dating/relationship scene in which casual consensual sex
happens.

That said, I know that I do have a belief that one of the few true "sins" is
the removal of personal agency from someone, and handing one's child over to
her rapist is very much that; I wouldn't be surprised if I considered that
action to be bad to a greater degree than others would. Still, at least I'm
aware of my own prejudices in this.

~~~
eternalban
You should read my remark in the sense of 'social regimes are damned difficult
to resist' and it appears humans have coping psychological mechanisms for
individual members to deal with these sort of collective/individual dynamics,
so focusing a judgmental gaze on individuals is misguided. We should look at
the larger social construct, its evolution (how it got there), and finding
possible cultural pathways to guide them out of their moral culdesac.

[with p.s. to add regarding the "guiding" part: assuming our own moral
condition is in fact in a healthy condition.]

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Svekax
Rape, imprisonment, threats, assault, etc. are already illegal. I fail to see
how adding an additional law will suddenly fix these situations.

But raising the marriage age above the age of consent (like what was attempted
in New Jersey) will cause real harm to people who have nothing to do with
those situations. Teenagers won't be able to cover their pregnant partners
under their insurance. Soldiers won't be able to get married before joining.
More children will be born out of wedlock. What do democrats shout at Trump's
plans to end Obamacare? "If you do this, people will die!"

The minimum marriage age should be the age of consent and not a year higher.

~~~
lultimouomo
You mean the USA allow underaged boys and girls to enlist as soldiers?

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Svekax
What do you mean by "underaged"?

~~~
rahkiin
17 years old or less, I presume

~~~
Svekax
The minimum enlistment age is 17 with parental consent. Underage would be 16
or younger.

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moonforeshot
wtf? U.S. isn't some 3rd world country...?

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lolc
Even Vatican City has raised the age of consent to 14 for women.

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dennisgorelik
1) What the author of that article calls "rape" is probably a "statutory rape"
which is a very different thing than actual violent rape that most readers
visualize.

2) "it did interrupt Johnson’s attendance at elementary school"

That is baloney.

Why would marriage interrupt school attendance? Sherry just used her pregnancy
and marriage as an excuse not go to school. That was her choice and had
nothing to do with her legal status.

3) "two-thirds of marriages of underage girls don’t last"

So what? Half of marriages do not last. Does it mean we have to ban all the
marriages now?

Or, may be, we should ban employment, because employment does not last too?

How about one third of underage marriages that actually do last? Why should we
ban them?

~~~
Mz
If you read the full article, this was probably actually rape, compounded by
it being child rape. But I do agree that changing marriage laws doesn't really
fix the situation described. The grown men raping little girls should be
prosecuted for it instead of getting the girl handed over to them by the
parents.

Changing the marriage laws won't solve something so deeply sick and twisted.
The situation described is a case of serious local corruption. They issued
marriage licenses to put an end to rape investigations. Totally messed up
stuff, not easily fixed.

