A measure that took effect this month removes a so-called pregnancy exception in the state – but concerns remain across the US

Until this month, there was no minimum age requirement to get married in Virginia – if you could meet certain criteria.

Girls as young as 13 years old, and pregnant, were wed with a judge’s approval in recent years, according to records from the Virginia department of health. Almost 4,500 minors were married between 2004 and 2013. About 90% of those minors were girls who married adult men.

The state senator Jill Vogel pushed through a bill that went into effect this month to ban marriages by those younger than 18, after she learned of a man in his 50s who was dating a high school student.

Although the man had previously married and divorced another teenager, child protective services was powerless to intervene as the girl was not being harmed by a parent or legal guardian, she said. Vogel realized that marriage laws in Virginia failed to protect children from forced or coerced marriages, rendering minors vulnerable to sexual abuse.

“The fact that you can marry a child is, to me, unconscionable where we are in today’s society,” Vogel said.

Under the new Virginia law, 16- and 17-year-olds must apply to become emancipated before they can marry. A judge will evaluate whether a minor is being coerced to marry and may consider the age difference between a couple and a person’s criminal history in considering an application.

The new Virginia law removed the so-called pregnancy exception, which automatically granted permission for children to wed if they were pregnant and had their parents’ consent.

“This was one of the really, really unbelievable loopholes in the law, that you could marry somebody as a way to avoid prosecution,” said Vogel.

Jeanne Smoot, a lawyer at the Tahirih Justice Center, which drafted the new Virginia law, said: “Pregnancy exceptions don’t exist to help children but to shield adults from accountability.” A 13-year-old girl’s pregnancy “should not have been looked at as grounds to grant a marriage license but evidence that she’s at risk,” she added.

There are a handful of states, such as Florida and New Mexico, that set no minimum age for minors to marry if a female is pregnant. All states allow some minors under 18 to marry.

Many advocates believe even the amended law doesn’t go far enough to protect minors, especially immigrant girls, from forced marriages. They are campaigning to ban marriages for those under 18 in all states, with no exceptions.

There were about 3,000 known cases of forced marriages across the US between 2009 and 2011, according to a survey conducted by the Tahirih Justice Center, a legal service organization for immigrant women fleeing violence. Many victims were girls under the age of 18 who came from immigrant communities.

The US lags behind other western countries such as the United Kingdom, which has special laws to protect victims of forced marriages and a national helpline. Immigrants in the US may be reluctant to report forced marriages or seek help when facing violent threats, according to the survey’s respondents.

In 2009, for example, Faleh Hassan Almaleki, an Iraqi immigrant, ran over his 20-year-old daughter, Noor Almaleki, in a parking lot outside Phoenix, Arizona, for rejecting an arranged marriage and for being “too westernized”. She died two weeks later. Almaleki was found guilty of second-degree murder.

Fraidy Reiss, the founder of Unchained at Last, a not-for-profit group that assists women affected by forced marriages, cautioned that “forced marriages will slip by” even under the new Virginia law.

“It doesn’t matter what the age difference is: a marriage can be forced whether a couple is 40 years apart or the same age,” Reiss said. “We shouldn’t have legal exceptions for something that’s a human rights abuse.”

Unchained at Last has successfully campaigned to introduce a bill to raise the marriage age in New Jersey. Similar bills were introduced in Maryland and New York, although they did not pass before end of the legislative sessions. Both states allow young teens to marry in some circumstances.

Advocates say they regularly field calls from girls under 18 who are coerced or forced into marriages by family members as well as their ethnic and religious communities.

“Often, there is nothing I can do to help them,” Reiss said. “We very rarely have a good outcome when a minor calls begging us for help. Often, these girls turn to self-harm or try to kill themselves.”

It’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly distinguishes an arranged marriage from a forced marriage, according to Reiss. In an extreme case of forced marriage, a couple is married at gunpoint. In a marriage that’s arranged but not forced, two people are introduced to each other and have time to get to know each other and decide whether to get married. Most of the 230 women and girls Unchained at Last has assisted were faced with a marriage that fell somewhere between the two.

While Reiss is campaigning for legal reform, she realizes that new laws won’t end the practice of child marriage in the US. She often fields calls from girls from immigrant communities whose relatives are threatening to take them back to their home country to wed.

“A lot of parents don’t realize that child marriage is legal in the US,” Reiss said, recalling a conversation with an advocate in New York who urged her to pass new laws quickly and quietly before parents realize “they don’t need to go to Pakistan to do this. They can go to the clerk’s office.”