It took us seven years, but we finally convinced New Hampshire that child marriage is bad!
Gov. Chris Sununu just signed legislation — on which we had partnered with Sen. Debra Altschiller, Rep. Cassie Levesque and allies across New Hampshire — to make the marriage age 18, no exceptions.
So we are now 13 states down in our push to end an archaic, harmful practice that destroys girls’ lives and creates a nightmarish legal trap for them. That’s a big deal for the 9.3 million girls who live in those 13 states.
Bills to limit or end child marriage died in the legislature during the previous six sessions, but we refused to give up. Alongside our allies in the New Hampshire Coalition to End Child Marriage that we convened, as well as legislative champions like Sen. Altschiller and Rep. Levesque, we met one-on-one with key New Hampshire state legislators. We testified at legislative hearings and submitted memos of support, and we recruited our allies to do the same. We compiled in-depth legal research conducted on a pro bono basis by the law firms White & Case and DLA Piper. We launched email campaigns to target state legislators.
And it worked!
Supporters like Elluminate, Focus For Health and the Jewish Women’s Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago made our work possible with their generosity. And you made this victory possible, if you took action on our email campaigns, shared our posts on social media or supported us financially.
New Hampshire took an important first step in 2018 toward ending child marriage by raising the marriage age to 16, but that legislation did not go far enough: 96% of the minors who married in New Hampshire between 2000 and 2023 were age 16 or 17, so the 2018 legislation only protected four percent of the individuals it was intended to protect. Previously, the law allowed a parent to marry off girls as young as 13 and boys as young as 14.
The new legislation closes the dangerous legal loopholes that allow parents to enter a child as young as 16 into marriage without any input required from the child, and without any real legal recourse for a child who does not want to marry.
Our research found that some 215 minors as young as 13 were wed in New Hampshire between 2000 and 2023 — and more than 80% were girls wed to adult men an average of nearly four years older.
Furthermore, child marriage creates a nightmarish legal trap that destroys nearly every aspect of an American girl’s life. There’s a reason the U.S. State Department has called marriage before 18 a “human rights abuse.”
New Hampshire has now joined Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington and Virginia in embracing the simple, commonsense legislative solution we are pushing in all 50 U.S. states: Set the marriage age at 18, without exceptions. Such legislation harms no one, costs nothing and ends a human rights abuse.
Only 37 states to go. If you keep partnering with us and cheering us on, we promise to keep fighting for the 27 million girls who live in those states. Please donate now.
The New Hampshire Coalition to End Child Marriage includes:
