With hundreds of child brides in Arizona, the Legislature looks at restrictions

Dustin Gardiner | The Republic | azcentral.com

Show Caption Hide Caption Child marriage in Arizona Arizona House Bill 2006, the proposal that originally would have banned child marriage, was amended to only prohibit marriages under the age of 16.

Every year, about 100 children get marriage licenses in Maricopa County.

The vast majority of them are girls marrying older men, county court records show. Usually, the men are a handful or years older — but sometimes, they’re a decade or more older.

A 41-year-old man received a court's permission to marry a 17-year-old girl in 2014 in one case.

And that’s just the picture in the state’s most urban county.

Nobody knows exactly how many children get marriage licenses in Arizona’s more rural counties — including Mohave County, which includes the polygamous enclave of Colorado City.

Those counties don’t track the data by age, a spokeswoman for the state court system said.

State Rep. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, R-Scottsdale, said she was shocked by the laws governing child marriage in Arizona when she started reading about efforts to stop the practice in other states last summer.

That’s why this year she proposed legislation to ban all marriages for people under the age of 18. The effort drew praise from child marriage opponents as Arizona would have been the first state in the country to ban underage marriage without exceptions.

Arizona is one of 25 states without a minimum age for marriage, according to Unchained At Last, a non-profit that works to end child marriage in the United States.

TALKING POLITICS: Listen to our Arizona politics podcast, The Gaggle, on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher or Google Play.

But Ugenti-Rita’s bill was watered down by the time the Arizona House of Representatives voted to approve it last week.

House Bill 2006, the proposal that originally would have banned child marriage, was amended to prohibit marriages under the age of 16. Children ages 16 and 17 could still get married if they have a parent’s consent or are legally emancipated from their parents.

While child marriage is still legal in all states, U.S. foreign policy calls the practice a human rights abuse.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of State released the U.S. Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls, which declared marriage in which one or both people are under the age of 18 to be "a human rights abuse that contributes to economic hardship and leads to under-investment in girls’ educational and health care needs."

The report states that child and forced marriages are "often rooted in patriarchal beliefs that value girls less and confine them to traditional roles of motherhood and domestic labor."

Ban on child marriage dropped

How a bill becomes a law in Arizona (in a nutshell) Not sure how laws are created in Arizona? Here's a brief overview.

Ugenti-Rita said she agreed to amend the bill after some Republican leaders said an outright ban would have been too restrictive.

Current state law allows minors under 18 — the age of legal adulthood — to get married if they have the consent of one parent or legal guardian. Children under 16 must get a judge’s approval, and the judge must find that the “minor is entering into the marriage voluntarily.”

Ugenti-Rita said her bill is a move in the right direction because it, at least, outlaws marriage for children younger than 16.

“I feel comfortable with the compromise,” she said. “Age plays a major role in one’s ability to comprehend the magnitude of a decision.”

The bill would also prohibit 16- and 17-year-olds from marrying anyone who’s more than three years older than they are. Ugenti-Rita said that would help prevent children from entering abusive relationships with spouses who are significantly older.

But opponents of childhood marriage criticized the move to dilute the impact of HB 2006.

Fraidy Reiss is the founder and executive director of Unchained At Last, the group pushing to end child marriage nationally. She said girls who get married before adulthood are more likely to be physically or sexually abused.

“I wouldn’t even call it a step in the right direction because it is so weak,” Reiss said of the bill. “It’s still a human rights abuse. It destroys a girl’s life. It destroys her health, her education.”

She said girls who are 16 and 17 are often the most vulnerable to forced and arranged marriages, so HB 2006 carves out a loophole for children who are typically the most in need of protection.

“When you’re forced to marry, it’s almost guaranteed that your parents are the perpetrators,” Reiss said.

Lawmaker: ‘Young marriage can be a very happy marriage”

The House voted 51-7 to pass the bill Feb. 20. Seven Republican lawmakers voted against HB 2006, including several who argued many underage girls enter happy marriages in their mid and late teens.

Rep. David Stringer, R-Prescott, has been the bill’s most outspoken opponent. He told lawmakers the story of his grandfather and grandmother, immigrants from Ukraine, who married when he was 21 and she was 16. Stringer said they had 10 children.

“Had they not been married, I would not be here,” he said. “Even a very young marriage can be a very happy marriage and a very successful marriage.”

Another opponent of the bill said parents, religious leaders and people “who love each other” should decide when marriage is appropriate, rather than the “nanny state” deciding.

“We know plenty of exceptions where young girls have been married before they turn 16, happily married to a loving husband with children,” said Rep. Noel Campbell, R-Prescott.

RELATED NEWS ON CHILD MARRIAGES:

Ex-teen bride wins $16 million case against FLDS

Children can legally marry in Arizona, but a lawmaker wants to change that

Child labor case tied to polygamous group in Utah-Arizona border town

Ugenti-Rita has said setting a minimum age for marriage shouldn’t be controversial given the state imposes age restrictions for many things including purchasing cigarettes, lottery tickets and alcohol, gambling and voting.

The bill now goes to the Senate, where it will face another public hearing.

How common are child brides?

As Ugenti-Rita researched her proposed bill last year, she said she was shocked to learn just how prevalent child brides still are in Arizona.

Exactly how many marriages occur nationally is unclear because some states, including Arizona, don’t track the data. A report from the PBS news show Frontline and Unchained At Last found at least 207,468 minors were married between 2000 and 2015 nationwide.

Census data, however, shows an estimated 2,240 children ages 15 to 17 who had been married were living in Arizona as of 2014, according to an analysis by Unchained At Last.

The Arizona Republic analyzed marriage license data from the Maricopa County Superior Court, the only county that tracks the age of applicants, for a roughly five-year period that ended July 1, 2017.

Among the findings:

570 minors received marriage licenses. It’s unclear from court data how many of them ultimately filed the license, a step required to finalize a marriage.

406 marriage licenses were granted to 17-year-olds; 164 were granted to 16-year-olds.

In the county, nobody younger than 16 received a marriage license over the five-year period.

In 82 percent of marriages, underage girls were paired with adult men; 9 percent were boys with older women; and 9 percent were between two minors.

In 22 instances, a minor married an adult who was a decade or more older than them. The bride was the minor in all of those 22 instances, except for one male-male couple.

The biggest age gaps: 41- and 37-year-old men got licenses to marry 17-year-old girls; a 34-year-old man got a license to marry a 17-year-old boy.

On average, the age gap between a minor and her or his prospective spouse was about two years.

The number of underage marriages per year has decreased, from 134 five years ago to 72 in the 2016-17 fiscal year.

National movement to end child marriage

Azcentral

Unchained At Last and other groups that oppose child marriage have sparked a national movement to outlaw or restrict the practice. Currently, every state allows minors to marry with the consent of a parent or judge.

Efforts to stop underage marriage have been met with mixed results, however.

In the last year, New York raised its minimum marriage age from 14 to 17; Connecticut raised its legal age to 16; Texas prohibited marriage for anyone under 16 and required those under 18 to get a judge’s permission.

But bills to ban child marriage were blocked in California and New Jersey. Opposition has come from both the political left and right.

In California, an American Civil Liberties Union branch opposed the effort there, saying that it "unnecessarily and unduly intrudes on the fundamental right of marriage."

"We’re not convinced that banning legal marriage will stop these coercive relationships from happening," Phyllida Burlingame, the reproductive justice policy director at the ACLU of Northern California, told Frontline.

In New Jersey, Republican Gov. Chris Christie vetoed a similar bill, writing that it "would violate the cultures and traditions of some communities in New Jersey based on religious traditions."

Other opponents have argued that minors who get pregnant shouldn’t be forced to have their child out of wedlock.

This year, state lawmakers in Missouri and Florida have also proposed bills to restrict underage marriages; both bills have faced fervent opposition. A Tennessee lawmaker has proposed an outright ban.

Republic reporter Kaila White contributed to this article.