It’s familiar, that well-worn image of the overprotective dad who menacingly threatens his daughter’s date. It has long served as a tired, but congenial, premise, relied on for an easy laugh as casual sitcom fodder or invoked to create a family in-joke — just like that recent viral prom photo of a daughter, a date, a dad, and a handgun. Perhaps the most persistent cliché within this genre of jokes, which casts Dad as the armed security in his daughter’s love life, is the notion of a “shotgun wedding.”

Despite the cartoonish connotations of the term, the image of the shotgun wedding can become a more serious tool in the hands of some lawmakers who think child marriage is an acceptable alternative to abortion for unwed teen mothers. These lawmakers wield the “shotgun wedding” image in attempts to counter arguments against early marriage, a practice that’s been proved to lead many young people to suffering. But what exactly are the hard realities child marriage can create that these lawmakers who argue in support of it so often ignore?

In the United States, it’s still unclear exactly how many child marriages occur each year, precisely how young some children are when they’re wed, or whether they have a choice in their marriages. That’s a problem, as we now know early marriage can carry grave consequences. Recent studies have found that minors who marry are more likely to live in poverty, drop out of school, experience serious complications during pregnancy, develop psychiatric disorders, and become victims of domestic violence, the highest rates of which impact girls between the ages of 16 and 19.

A recently published study seeks to paint a more complete picture of child marriage in the U.S. by drawing from a different source, the American Community Survey (ACS), a Census Bureau program that releases information similar to the Census on an annual basis. It provided a sample of 616,107 teens between the ages of 15–17 in every state from 2010 to 2014, including responses from unmarried and married teens, capturing data on both licensed and unlicensed child marriages. This gave researchers access to consistent sets of data on child marriage that crossed every state and went beyond typical marriage license data. Among the study’s most clear-cut findings: Child marriage doesn't last.

“These marriages are not leading, to the best of our knowledge, to long-term marriages where they’re living together,” Jody Heymann told Teen Vogue. “So, I think that’s really important for people who believe that child marriage when there’s a pregnancy is actually forming a family and a long-term marriage. It’s not. It’s really not the solution.”

Heymann serves as the dean of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. In this role, she assisted Alissa Koski, a postdoctoral scholar, in investigating the prevalence of child marriage in the U.S. Together, they published “Child Marriage in the United States: How Common Is the Practice, And Which Children Are at Greatest Risk?” a new study that goes further than any other to show just how prevalent child marriage is in the U.S.

The picture their study paints is one of unsatisfying marriages that can end early or otherwise often continue without much contact between the married couple. Nationwide, Koski and Heymann found that 6.2 in every 1,000 teens between 15 and 17 surveyed said they have been married. In states like West Virginia, Hawaii, and North Dakota, it climbs as high as 10 in every 1,000. Of the teens who said they were married, 80% said they did not live with their spouses; most still lived at home with their parents. The study confirmed existing research to show that, nationally, girls between 15 and 17 surveyed were married more often than boys.