Thanks to Unchained At Last’s hard work, New Jersey today took a significant step closer to becoming the first US state to eliminate all marriage before 18.
The New Jersey assembly voted overwhelmingly to pass A3091, the bill Unchained helped to write that would end the human-rights abuse that is child marriage. The bill is still pending in the state senate.
“This is a huge win for girls and women across New Jersey,” said Fraidy Reiss, founder and executive director of Unchained, who spent much of the last several months building support for the bill. “But we can’t declare victory until the senate passes the bill and the governor signs it into law, making child marriage a problem of the past.”
New Jersey, like most US states, sets 18 as the minimum marriage age. After all, children can easily be forced into marriage or trapped in a marriage before they turn 18 and become legal adults. Also, the impacts of child marriage on a girl’s life are devastating enough that the State Department considers marriage before 18 a human-rights abuse.
However, like all states, New Jersey allows dangerous exceptions under which those under 18 can wed; state laws do not even specify an age below which a child cannot marry. Due to these exceptions, nearly 3,500 children as young as 13 were married in New Jersey between 1995 and 2012. Nearly all were girls married to adult men.
Unchained started a national conversation last year about America’s child-marriage problem, with an op-ed article published in the New York Times. Since that op-ed was published, Unchained has led the growing movement to end child marriage in every US state, by working with legislators in several states to write and pass legislation.
With today’s vote – in which seven assembly members abstained but not a single legislator voted no – New Jersey becomes the closest to passing a bill to end all child marriage. Asw. Nancy Munoz was the legislator who championed the bill in the assembly, and Sen. Nellie Pou is doing the same in the senate.
Read more here, including details about similar legislation in other states.
You get credit for this win if you joined the Chain-In in Newark that Unchained organized in July, where some 35 people, dressed in bridal gowns and veils, chained their arms and taped their mouths to protest child marriage.
You get credit if you submitted any of the more than 7,550 pre-filled emails to legislators that have been sent so far through Unchained’s email campaign. You get credit if you wrote one of the nearly 20 memos of support Unchained forwarded to the assembly judiciary committee, or if you testified with Unchained at a legislative hearing about A3091.
You get credit if you support Unchained financially. You get credit if you read and forward Unchained emails and like, share and retweet Unchained’s social media messages.
If this describes you, thank you. Well done.
