by Mariel Padilla19th, this story was originally published 19th
This is the story Originally reported by Mariel Padilla 19th. Meet Mariel and read more of her reports on gender, politics and policy.
When Carmen Martel was 14, she met a 23-year-old man in her small New Hampshire town. He worked in a nearby brickyard and she loved him. He starts skipping school, runs away and gets into legal trouble. At one point, a judge ordered him to go to a disciplinary group home in Vermont — but Martel’s mother didn’t want him to go that far.
“I got on well with my mom — I was the youngest of 11 kids,” Martell said. “I wasn’t in trouble with the law or school or anything before I met him. I was pretty sheltered.”
Her mother went to the brickyard and told her boyfriend that if he didn’t marry Martell, she would charge him with statutory rape of a minor. So within weeks of her eighth grade year in 1985, Martel got married. He was 15 years old.
He never went back to school. She suffered years of domestic violence from her partner, eventually divorcing him to protect her children. His mother died, leaving him without emotional or financial support. He needed government help to stay afloat.
“I think my whole life I’ve had to do everything in survival mode,” Martel said. “Even after the divorce, I remarried but it was the same pattern. It was the only pattern I knew.”
Martell’s story is not unique. Between 2000 and 2021, about 315,000 minors were legally married in the United States — with girls far more likely to be married than boys. Child marriage was legal in all 50 states as of 2018, but since then, 16 states have passed the ban.
The rate of child marriage in the United States is relatively low, but its continued prevalence has drawn the attention of researchers who want to eradicate the practice altogether. This week, Sheryl Sandberg, Meta’s former chief operating officer and founder of the Lean In Foundation, released a new report in partnership with Columbia University, “Accelerating efforts to end child marriage“It calculated that the global cost of inactivity is $175 billion per year. The report also highlighted potential strategies — including investments in education, improving access to reproductive health, and changing cultural and social norms — that could help end the practice in the United States.
“We rarely talk about child marriage in economic terms, but we should. In addition to the concrete costs in lost productivity and higher health costs, child marriage forecloses the ingenuity and ideas that each girl can bring to the world — an incalculable abuse,” Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state and former senator, and Sheryl Sandsberg wrote in the report. Clinton is currently the board chair of Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics.
Rachel Vogelstein, director of the Women’s Initiative at Columbia’s Institute of Global Politics and co-author of the new report, said the global child marriage rate has fallen from 1 in 4 girls to 1 in 5 over the past 25 years. But advocates and researchers are concerned about equality from countries and trends in child marriage and the trend away from child marriage
Last year, the United States froze billions of dollars in foreign aid that helped advance women’s rights and gender equality, including programs to help end child marriage. Vogelstein also points to a number of authoritarian tendencies and populist regimes that have dismantled government agencies focused on advancing women’s and girls’ rights, including in Türkiye and Argentina. In Iraq, parliament recently proposed an amendment that would allow girls to marry at age 9.
“There is concern that this greater aggression in commitment to the human rights of women and girls and the response to gender equality that we’re seeing unfold here in the United States will affect the fight against child marriage everywhere, including here,” Vogelstein said.
Although most child marriages occur in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, the United States demonstrates that child marriage can still exist in countries where girls have strong access to education and employment.
“I think a lot of it gets excused as tradition or culture,” Sandberg said. “Well, there are many things in the world that were cultural that were terrible and long gone.”
What makes the report particularly unique is its focus on the economic impact of child marriage. According to an analysis by the Center for Global Development, child marriage costs the world up to $175 billion each year – about $2.5 trillion by 2040 – from lost productivity and increased health risks. The report argues that only $1.3 billion would need to be invested to reduce child marriage rates by 30 percent over the next five years.
“I hope that people start thinking about it not just as something that we should address because it’s the right thing to do, but something that we should address because it’s the smart thing to do,” Vogelstein said.
Fatima Mada Bio, First Lady of Sierra Leone and member of Colombia’s Child Marriage Advisory Council, said she was able to decriminalize child marriage in her country after five years of buy-in from communities and people. Mada Bio is one of the most vocal advocates against child marriage, and she argues that it is not a humanitarian problem.
“I’ve been around the world talking about this issue, and I’ve never seen a finance minister talk about the financial implications of this issue for any government,” Mada Bio said. “And they should be talking about it. And education ministers should be talking about the benefits of keeping women in school. Health ministers should be talking about how many girls are dying in their hospitals.”
Mada Bio says she continues to fight to end child marriage across the country because she herself got married at the age of 12 and knows the impact it can have on girls’ lives.
“The Fatima that didn’t have a voice is the Fatima that I am fighting now,” said Mada Bio.
Martell, now 56, said she was at a doctor’s appointment a few years ago and saw in her medical notes: “Child Abuse.”
He immediately called the doctor and said, “What do you mean? My mother never abused me.” And for the first time, someone explained to Martel that when she got married, she was still a child. Martel said he plays that conversation over and over in his head.
“I never thought about it,” Martel said. “If someone asked me if a 15-year-old should be married today, I would be totally against it. I would go to a protest or sign any petition. I think those years shaped my life.”
Martel said she was shocked to learn that child marriage is still legal in most parts of the United States. Her home state, New Hampshire, didn’t pass the ban until 2024 — nearly 40 years after she married as a minor.
“I wish I had a law then,” said Martel. “I wanted it, but you’re too young.” You can’t buy cigarettes. You can’t drive. You can’t do much, but you are still allowed to marry. It’s mind-blowing. I didn’t know any better then. I didn’t see life through all the cracks and crevices – I had blinders on.”
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