ending child marriage
The United States has a child marriage problem, our new study proves.
Join us and Chelsea Clinton on June 17 for a virtual discussion of the groundbreaking study, which found nearly 300,000 children were legally married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018 — mostly girls wed to adult men, typically before the girls were old enough to file for divorce or enter a domestic violence shelter. Some 60,000 marriages occurred at an age or with a spousal age difference that should have been considered a sex crime.
We’ll mark our 10th anniversary by talking with bipartisan legislators, advocates and a survivor about the grave implications of child marriage for girls, women and society — and about the simple solution that is available.
United States’ Child Marriage Problem
June 17, 2021
3 p.m. – 4 p.m. ET / 12 p.m. – 1 p.m. PT
RSVP here (required)
Moderator
~ Chelsea Clinton, Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation
Speakers
~ New York Sen. Julia Salazar
~ South Carolina Sen. Katrina Shealy
~ Dr. Yvette Efevbera, Advisor, Gender-Based Violence and Child Marriage, Gender Equality at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
~ Blair Imani, author, educator and influencer
~ Patricia Abatemarco, child marriage survivor and mental health advocate
~ Fraidy Reiss, founder/executive director at Unchained At Last
Sponsored by Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton
About the Study
Child marriage is legal in most of the U.S., but many Americans remain unaware of the prevalence of child marriage in their country — possibly because no central repository collects national marriage-age data in the U.S., and some states do not track or publicize these data.
We sought to change that with our new study. Thanks to funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we partnered with McGill University, Quest Research & Investigations, Kroll and Quantitative Analysis on the first-ever study that employed state-by-state data collection and various estimation methods to determine the full extent of child marriage in the U.S.
About Unchained At Last
This event marks our 10th anniversary as the only organization dedicated to ending forced and child marriage in the United States through direct services and advocacy.
We provide crucial legal and social services, always for free, to help women, girls and others in the U.S. to escape forced marriages. At the same time, we push for social, policy and legal change; we started and now lead a growing national movement to eliminate child marriage in every U.S. state and at the federal level.
