I was raised in a family where abuse and neglect were normal. As a result, I was severely depressed, and at the age of 12, I attempted suicide. I called a local crisis hotline and spoke to a man who was a third-year missionary training student. He convinced me and my parents that he could provide counseling to me and that I didn’t need the antidepressants that the doctors had prescribed. I saw him twice a week for counseling from then on.
Later that summer, his apartment building caught fire, and he convinced my parents to let him move into their basement. He immediately began molesting me. I became pregnant right before I turned 14. My parents said I could only keep my child if I married him and that I had brought shame to my family. So, in May of 1980, we went on a road trip so I could be married off. We first stopped in Kentucky, and when the judge refused to do the ceremony due to my age, we drove on to Alabama. There, a judge had no problem with the situation, and in a six-minute ceremony I was married to the 27-year-old pedophile who had abused me.
When my daughter was two weeks old, my parents could not stop my husband from beating her, and so I was told we had to move out, as though I could stop him from hurting her. For the next 14 months, I juggled high school, keeping house and trying to keep myself and my baby alive around a man who grew more violent every day. I begged my parents for help and told them he would kill us; their response was that I was a married woman and had to figure it out myself. Eventually I began counseling again to “cure my depression and make me a better wife.” My therapist asked me immediately how often my husband beat me, and when I said every day, he promised to help. He had a social worker waiting the next week when I walked into his office. I was taken to a shelter for battered children. Eventually, they removed my child from the home as well.
Even though most child marriages like mine ultimately result in divorce, those divorces cannot be initiated by the children themselves. I was considered emancipated the day I was married, yet I was too young to drive, get a job, rent an apartment or file for a divorce. I had to have a court-appointed advocate act on my behalf. I left school in the middle of the day to go to court for my divorce. I made it back in time for 11th-grade English class.
Later, I spent the ages of 18-21 drinking every day before I got sober. I’ve struggled with depression and, perhaps most of all, with having a relationship with my family. It is clear to me now that they traded my safety and that of my daughter to preserve their social standing in the community and the church. That pain has never completely left me, and my life has never been the same. My relationship with my parents never recovered. I have chronic PTSD and depression; worse, I had no support system or self-confidence, so I ended up giving my child up for adoption. My coerced marriage was forced on me to cover up sexual abuse, and for my former husband, it was a way to avoid being charged with a crime. I never felt like a child, only like someone clearly incompetent to fix what was happening to us.
Even though I know now as a middle-aged woman that I couldn’t have done more than I did, it doesn’t do much to relieve the nightmares. This didn’t happen in a far-off country. I was raised in an upper-middle-class suburban home in the midwestern U.S. My family looked a lot like yours probably does.
And what happened to me is still legal. Children in these marriages are trapped. If there had been laws against marriage before the age of 18, I couldn’t have been coerced to marry. I feel strongly that we must outlaw child marriage, and that it must not be allowed to be used as a front to hide sexual abuse any longer.
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