Do you have any idea how much we at Unchained At Last accomplished in 2017 to combat forced and child marriage in America, with your help?
Nicholas Kristof shined a spotlight on our work, for the New York Times, Samantha Bee did the same for Full Frontal. We appeared on BBC (radio in January, and television in October), CBS, PBS (online) and Public Radio International.
In December, Forbes named our founder, Fraidy Reiss, one of Five Fearless Female Founders to Follow in 2018.
One of those women and girls was Mariam (not her real name or photo), whose parents tried to force her into marriage when she was 17. She turned to us for help, but helping her seemed impossible: We could face kidnapping charges if we rescued her, because she was not yet a legal adult, and the domestic-violence shelter in her county refused to accept her for the same reason.
So we coached Mariam to convince her parents to delay the marriage for a few months, until after she graduated from high school and turned 18. During those tense months, Mariam checked in with us daily by texting us an ever-changing code word. We knew what to do if we did not get the right code: Immediately send the police. And as soon as she graduated from high school, we helped Mariam to leave home and move onto a college campus where she is now in her sophomore year, single, safe and happy.
We still check in with Mariam regularly and send her the occasional care package – she has become part of our family – but we no longer need to use a code word.
After we shocked the nation with an op-ed article in the New York Times in 2015 showing child marriage was legal in all 50 states, we followed up in February with an op-ed article in the Washington Post that revealed the horrifying extent of America’s child-marriage problem: An estimated quarter-million children, at least as young as 12, were married here between 2000 and 2010 – mostly girls to adult men.
We recruited allies, built grassroots support and worked with legislators across the US to expand the national movement this year. We came THIS close to ending child marriage in New Jersey, before Gov. Chris Christie, America’s most hated governor, conditionally vetoed the bill in May. We’ll try again in the upcoming legislative session, under the new and improved governor there.
We also helped to write and/or promote strong legislation now pending in Florida, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Arizona. We’re working to improve a bill pending in Ohio. And we helped to write and/or promote strong legislation that flopped in California (where it’s been amended into a dangerous bill), New Hampshire (where it was defeated) and Maryland (where it died for the second time and is about to be re-introduced). We tried, unsuccessfully, to improve bills that passed in New York, Connecticut and Texas that limit child marriage but do not end it. And we are working with federal legislators too.
We thank the law firm White & Case for making this important work possible by conducting extensive pro bono legal research. And we thank the lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck for taking on this project, at the federal level and in some states, on a pro bono basis.
Some 120 people joined the Chain-In, in three states, drawing significant media attention to the problem of child marriage in America and to the legislation Unchained has written to solve the problem.
Join our e-mail list to be sure you know about Unchained’s next Chain-In.
Let’s keep up our important work. In 2018, let’s serve even more women and girls who are fleeing forced marriages. Let’s keep expanding the national movement to end child marriage in America, state by state, by introducing even more laws and organizing more Chain-Ins.
Please keep doing what you’ve been doing:
