News Corp is a network of leading companies in the worlds of diversified media, news, education, and information services. AN AMERICAN former child bride has told her harrowing story to raise awareness of the shameful practice of child marriage still happening in the Usa child brides. While countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi and El Salvador have recently banned child marriage, it is shockingly legal in some circumstances in almost every state in the US. Angel was 13 when her mother forced her to marry and start a family In a new BBC documentary series entitled America First, former child bride Angel, now 26, from Idaho, recalled how she was just 13 when her mum forced her to marry and start a family.
She said: “I was just a little girl who wanting to have a boyfriend but my mum turned it into something way different. When I got married I had just turned 13. We stood in my living room and in this ugly dress that my mother bought from the internet. Shortly after getting married, she encouraged us to start having kids and that’s why I had my first son at 15. It was a way for me to be dependent on her. In half of US states, the law does not specify any minimum age below which a child cannot marry Angel, who has has five children – two with her new husband – revealed how she “felt like a slave” to her abusive ex before she left him. She said: “My ex was extremely abusive to me and I was very confused because this was the only guy I have ever been with.
So when he started shoving me and all that stuff while I was pregnant, I thought, this was my life how could this be? I was a slave to my ex. I was a slave to this idea that my mother wanted us to all be together and for me to have kids so young and to do all that I still have all this emotional baggage of wanting to have done something with my life by now. Although nearly every US state has laws banning children under 18 from marrying, there are ways to get exemptions – for example, by asking for judicial consent or presenting parents’ permission, according to the Pew Research Center. While the rules are different in each state, in 25 of them, there is no set minimum age below which a child can’t get married. Between 2000 and 2015, more than 200,000 children were married in the US, according to the BBC. About 87 per cent of child marriages in America involved underage girls and while 13 per cent involved underage boys.
The BBC documentary focused on the US state of Idaho – which has one of the highest rates of child marriage anywhere in the country. Child marriage is most common in the southern United States, according to Pew Research Center. West Virginia and Texas, followed by states like Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Nevada and California – where about seven of every 1,000 15- to 17-year-olds were married in 2014. It comes Zimbabwe drafted a bill to outlaw child marriages declaring 18 is the legal minimum age of marriage. Previously, girls could get married age 16, while boys could marry at 18. News Group Newspapers Limited in England No. 679215 Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF.
