The Child Marriage Next Door: ‘My father introduced me to a man in the morning and I was married to him that same evening.’

THE STORY OF A CHILD BRIDE WITH A DREAM

Sara Tasneem had always dreamed of flying a plane. She grew up wanting to join the Air Force and then attend law school. Her dreams, though, were short-lived.

Not long after turning 15, her father arranged for her to be married to a 28-year-old stranger.

“I was actually just visiting my dad that summer,” said Tasneem. “I had just finished my freshman year and I had anticipated going back to live with my mom to finish the rest of my high school. She had no idea that was happening.”

Her mother, who was already separated from her father due to his overwhelming devotion to an Islamic “cult,” was absent during Tasneem’s religious wedding ceremony. While Tasneem’s mother was kept in the dark about the event until long after it was over, no one ever asked the girl for her consent to marry.

Sara Tasneem

To keep Tasneem’s mother at bay, her father and new husband made her lie to her mother over the phone. They insisted that she tell the woman that she had decided to live with her father from then on and would not be returning to live with her, to cover up the marriage ceremony which had already taken place.

Tasneem’s forced marriage on false pretenses did not take place in some far-off underdeveloped country. It was in California, a state that is not as advanced as many Californians might think on such issues. There is no legislation in the state that sets a minimum age for children to marry if a parent wants them to and they have a court order.

So her father’s insistence was enough to change the course of her life forever.

Tasneem grew up in a household where gender roles dogged women at all hours of the day, leaving little room for respite. As a child, she had been taught to serve men, attract no attention to herself, avert her gaze away from a man’s when spoken to, and remain with female relatives at family events.

Tasneem later discovered that her experiences were fairly common and that child marriage is often intergenerational. The adults involved in such marriages often believe it is normal as a result of their own upbringings in environments where the sexual abuse of children is common. This baggage infects their views of marriage involving minors.

“​​It is pedophilia,” said Tasneem bluntly, who went on to learn a great deal about such issues. “Many of these marriages skirt around statutory rape laws and age-of-consent laws. And so it is really clear in my mind that these laws are extremely sexist and biased against women.”

IS CHILD MARRIAGE REALLY THAT COMMON?

A 2021 study by Unchained At Last estimated that 300,000 minors entered into marriage in the U.S. from 2000 to 2018, but there is no reliable federal data on this either. A majority of the child brides counted by them were young girls under the age of 18, married by men who were on an average four years older than them.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there were at least 13,000 child marriages in California in the last five years. According to the Pew Research Center, California has the sixth-highest number of child marriages in the country.

In 2018, California’s state senator Jerry Hill drafted a bill to prohibit the marriage of people under 18. Although the legislation passed, current law still allows anyone under the age of 18 to marry, if one parent agrees.

In other words, a parent can still legally force a child to marry at any age. Laws attempting to stop this practice have come to a halt and there is no legislation that might do it anytime soon.

But there might be even more. California counties, which is the level where marriages are registered, do not try to keep track of the age of people getting married. This means that there is no reliable state-level data either.

This is part of what inspired Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris to introduce Assembly Bill 1286 in 2021 to require California counties to report the number of child marriages every three months.

Petrie-Norris argued that more reporting would make for a stronger case to ban child marriage in the state. The bill was passed with unanimous bipartisan support.

“California is one of only 13 states that does not have a minimum age requirement for marriage,” said Petrie-Norris in a statement in April 2021. “Previous legislative efforts to end child marriage in California have fallen flat, in part because opponents assert that this is not a real problem. This data will help substantiate what we know to be true — child marriage is a persistent and pervasive problem in California.”

Child marriage is a wider problem in the United States. It is legal in some form in 44 states, according to Unchained At Last, a nonprofit organization in New Jersey that fights against child marriage nationally. Nine states, including California, have no minimum age for marriage at all, so a parent can marry off girls or boys as young as 11 or 12 years old in these states.

There are many different motivations for marriages involving at least one underaged person, including those of older or much older men who simply want to marry girls who are not yet women.

The U.S. adopted the United Nations’ 2030 agenda for sustainable development in 2015, including Goal 5 which aims to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls,” and “eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation.” But the adoption of such goals and reality are two different things. The road towards the fulfillment of the goal is long and riddled with bureaucratic hurdles.

THE LONG ROAD TO FREEDOM

Rima Nashashibi, founder of Global Hope 365, a local organization which advocates against child marriage in California, said lawmakers are often unaware of the prevalence of this practice in the U.S.

“We meet with elected officials and some of them don't know that child marriage is still legal, so you have to raise awareness among the general public and elected officials,” she said.

Rima Nashashibi

In some cases, the parents of pregnant teenagers want their daughter to get married as a last resort in morally judgemental communities.

Nashashibi says that marriage at an early age can take a toll on a child’s mind and body, especially but not exclusively when a girl is pregnant. She notes that married minors who endure domestic violence from their adult spouses cannot go to a shelter because they are under 18, which is usually the accepted age.

According to Students Against Child Marriage, domestic violence shelters are often forbidden by law from helping minors fleeing the abuse from their spouses and laws are designed to help capture and return such runaway married minors back to their partners.

Beyond that, she notes the American Medical Association passed a resolution against child marriage because “Child marriage is associated with higher rates of sexually transmitted infections, early pregnancies, divorce, and intimate partner violence than women married at age 21” in addition to infant and maternal mortality.

“Most [survivors of child marriage] end up living in poverty and it takes longer to rebuild their lives,” said Nashashibi.

According to a study published by Duke University Press, girls in the U. S. who marry as teenagers are more likely to drop out of school end up impoverished and at a greater risk of psychiatric disorders. Another 2020 study by Child USA, a nonprofit thinktank working to end child abuse in the U.S., shows that about three-quarters end up in divorce and those who do are twice as likely to end up in poverty.

A FORMER CHILD BRIDE'S FIGHT AGAINST THE SYSTEM

When Dawn Tyree turned 11, her father and step-mother were preparing to head off to Texas to start a business. Even at that age, Tyree had sensed that her step-mother did not want her around; the woman seemed disgusted by the thought of raising another child, let alone someone else’s.

So before they left for the lonestar state, the woman hired a man as a “nanny,” as Tyree still calls him, to care for her.

Then they departed, leaving the little girl alone in California with the male nanny as her formal guardian.

The man, who was 32 years old, soon began making inappropriate comments about Tyree’s body. She repeatedly called her parents to tell them, but they did not believe her.

And then, her new guardian raped her.

The man insisted to Tyree that they were in love. He told her she was “old enough” to be in a relationship with him, even if other adults would never understand their love.

“He really built the abuse,” said Tyree. “He designed the abuse in a way that presented it as a loving, caring relationship that he loved me, he cared for me.”

He continued to violate the child for the next two years and by the summer of 1985, Tyree was pregnant.

When Tyree’s parents found out, they came up with a solution: Tyree, barely a teenager, should marry her nanny.

“And even at that time, at 13 years old, I could see clearly that society valued the life of a man over a girl,” says Tyree. “His future and his life were more important than mine. And it was about saving him and my parents. Without a doubt, my life was not considered, my future was not considered in the equation at all.”

He justified his actions by evoking the culture of child marriage of their ancestors a hundred years earlier, who would often get married and even give birth by the age of 15.

Well before the marriage which took place in Texas, Tyree recalls, “Behind closed doors, we were actually living like a married couple because we were alone 24/7. That's how he presented it to me.”

California requires court-mandated interviews of the parties and considers a variety of factors, including premarital counseling when necessary, for the child marriage to be deemed “consensual.”

Tyree has observed over the years that mandated visits by detectives often involve them asking stilted questions about whether a child is comfortable with a forced marriage.

“In no way would I have discussed my family dynamics, including the abuse that I was suffering,” she says. “I would not have disclosed that information to anyone outside of my family because you're not safe and you're being pressured. Any child marriage is a pressured or forced or coerced marriage because often girls are the peacekeepers in the family.”

At 16, after having a second child, a girl, Tyree decided to leave her husband. She was terrified at the prospect of him abusing their daughter.

That's when she began to plan her escape. It took a couple of tries before things fell into place. Their children went to stay with their paternal grandparents who babysat, believing Tyree had abandoned them.

But she showed up every weekend for visits. Once she found a job and a place to live, she took the kids out on a “weekend" visit and kept them.

She got a job at a local Toys“R”Us but could not afford the bills. Her ex-husband threatened to demand custody of the children if she sought financial support.

“For years, we lived often without electricity, without toilet paper,” she says, just to escape the abusive marriage.

THE CHILDREN OF SURVIVORS HAVE THEIR OWN BATTLES TO FIGHT

Dawn Tyree with her child

The children from child marriages rarely get off easy. While their parents are going through one of the most tumultuous phases of their life, they are often dragged into their fight, which later has consequences on their mental health, said Tyree.

Sara Tasneem's children

In her late teenage years, Tyree grappled with alcohol and cocaine addiction. She is now clean and seeks professional help to cope with her trauma.

“I can remember asking quite a few years ago my son, my oldest, ‘when did you know that we were poor?’. And he said whenever I asked to join sports and you said we couldn't afford it’”, said Tyree. “The addiction and the ripple effect has gone down to my children, too.”

Tasneem’s child marriage took a toll on her children as well. Her husband left the U. S. and she was she was tasked with the responsibility of raising the children on her own.

“They saw me struggle a lot,” said Tasneem. “There were times when I had to really choose between: Do I buy dinner for my kids or do I pay the bridge toll and gas to go to work? They're the unspoken victims in all this because it wasn't their fault.”

A LOVING MARRIAGE?

The work of Unchained At Last addresses how child marriages are frequently a way to cover up child rape. 60,000 marriages occurred since the year 2000 where the age difference signals a sex crime. The marriage license in about 88% of those marriages, allowed a person to avoid the legal definition of statutory rape for their actions.

Jeremy Malcolm, executive director of Prostasia Foundation, acknowledges that child marriage and pedophilia are interlinked. “When people think about child sexual abuse, they think about pedophilia. They never think about child marriage, which is also a form of child sexual abuse. So it's overlooked or not even considered as an abusive practice.”

THE MARRIAGE TRAP