A bill to ban child marriage in Texas has passed the state’s House of Representatives and is on its way to the Senate.
The measure, House Bill 168, also would void any existing marriages for anyone currently under the age of 18. The bill passed the House by a vote of 87-48.
"From the year 2000 to 2018, nearly 300,000 girls and boys under the age of 18 were legally married in the United States," state Rep. Jon Rosenthal (D-Houston), HB 168's author, told a House subcommittee last month. "Over 41,000 of those marriages were here in Texas."
The Texas Legislature raised the age of consent for marriage to 18 in 2017, with one significant exception. The law allowed children as young as 16 to marry if they were legally emancipated from their parents.
Rosenthal said that loophole has led to widespread abuses.
"Per (the Department of State Health Services) records of marriage applications from 2018 to 2021, which is the most recent batch we have since the last law was enacted, there are instances of severe age gaps of these emancipated minors — 10, 20 or even 30 years of age difference between them," Rosenthal said. "There are even instances that would be considered sexual offenses outside of marriage."
Becca Powell of the nonprofit Unchained at Last, which seeks to end child marriage, was more blunt.
"Sex with a 16-year-old is a crime if the perpetrator falls out of line of the close-in-age exception unless the perpetrator first marries the minor," Powell said. "Therefore, a marriage license involving a 16-year-old and a spouse outside the close-in-age exception is a get-out-of-jail-free card for a would-be child rapist."
Anna Katharina Dechert, Houston policy and advocacy manager at the Tahirih Justice Center, which aids immigrant survivors of gender-based violence, spelled out some of the reasons child marriages persist in Texas.
"They can arise when parents expect to control the marriage choices of their children," Dechert said. "Sometimes an abusive dating partner will threaten or coerce a teen into marriage. In other cases, sexual predators can groom and pressure vulnerable girls to marry them and further isolate and control them and to have round-the-clock access to them without fear of prosecution. Children can also be compelled to marry when abusive or neglectful parents try to offload them onto others. Some parents even seek to gain financially from such arrangements, making marriages in these cases a form of human trafficking."
Dechert also elaborated on some of the long-term consequences of such marriages for those forced to marry when under 18. These include greater vulnerability to sexual and domestic violence, increased medical and mental health problems, and increased risk of suicide.
"Girls who marry are 50% more likely to drop out of high school and four times less likely to graduate college. They are up to 31 percentage points more likely to live in future poverty, and for teen mothers, getting married and later divorcing can double the likelihood of poverty," Dechert said. "Given that up to 80% of marriages that involve just one person under the age of 18 end in divorce, that statistic should concern us all."
Michelle Sorensen told her story as the daughter of a woman who married before she was 18 and suffered for more than a decade in an abusive marriage. Sorensen described how she had fought, unsuccessfully, to convince the Louisiana state legislature to raise the minimum age of consent to 18.
"Girls in their 20s, volunteers as young as 18, and Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that it should be 18, but louder voices won out on the House floor, and the minimum floor was pushed down to 16," Sorensen said. "The greatest concern on the House floor that day was ensuring that children were born to teenage mothers in wedlock, not the exception to statutory rape for spouses."
There is a Senate companion bill identical to Rosenthal’s, Senate Bill 967 by state Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo), which has been stalled in the Senate State Affairs Committee since mid-February. That suggests the House bill faces long odds in the upper chamber.
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