Survivors of forced marriage and sexual abuse stood side by side with human rights activists on Thursday at the Washington State Capitol to call for the passage of a bill that would make eighteen the minimum legal age to get married — legislation that NPI’s research has found eight in ten Washingtonians support.
Organized by Unchained At Last and the Washington Coalition to End Child Marriage (of which NPI is a member), the demonstration served as a powerful and timely reminder to the Washington State Senate of the importance of taking up House Bill 1455, which the House of Representatives has now passed unanimously twice — once last year and once this year.
Two Democratic senators — Senator Derek Stanford and Senator Manka Dhingra, a Northwest Progressive Foundation boardmember — visited the demonstration and stood in solidarity with the survivors and activists, as did Democratic State Representative Monica Stonier, the prime sponsor of HB 1455.
The Northwest News Network, Fox 13, and The Seattle Times joined the Northwest Progressive Institute in covering the demonstration, which Unchained At Last calls a chain-in. They are so named because many participants wear fake chains and wedding gowns (and also put tape over their mouths) to call attention to people trapped in forced marriages, including many who are minors.
Chain-ins are “a unique form of peaceful but powerful protest that Unchained introduced in 2015,” the nonprofit explains on its website. To date, more than a dozen chain-ins have been held in other states, many of which have gone on to adopt legislation prohibiting child marriage (mostly in New England).
Washington could soon be the first state in the West to follow suit.
Unchained At Last has been lobbying to end child marriage for nearly a decade. The nonprofit “had been founded in 2011 by a forced marriage survivor with a mission of providing free legal and social services to help individuals in the U.S. to escape forced marriages – but more and more girls, under age eighteen, were reaching out to Unchained to plead for the same help,” the organization explains.
“At the time, child marriage was legal in all fifty U.S. states, a fact that seemed lost on policymakers and advocates. Yet there is almost nothing Unchained can do to help a girl who is not yet eighteen to escape a forced marriage. Even a day before her eighteenth birthday, a girl in the U.S. typically cannot leave home, enter a domestic violence shelter or even file for divorce.”
Unchained says child marriage is a big problem because:
- Child marriage can easily be forced marriage
- Child marriage is a human rights abuse that destroys American girls’ lives
- Child marriage undermines statutory rape laws
Child marriage is more common than you might think.
Between 2000 and 2018, 4,831 children got married in Washington State. That’s right: Four thousand, eight hundred and thirty-one children got married. Legally. And most of them were underage girls being wed to older men.
Idaho saw even more child marriages during that timespan… 5,160. Oregon saw somewhat fewer: 3,591. Across the three Pacific Northwest states, that’s 13,582 child marriages in less than two decades. Oregon requires minors to be seventeen to be married, while Idaho requires them to be seventeen.
Shockingly, Washington has never set any minimum age at all. The minimum age to get married in the Evergreen State is currently zero. We’ve got to change that. The adoption of House Bill 1455 will ensure that both parties in a marriage in Washington State are at least eighteen years of age.
After the demonstration concluded, I spoke with several survivors of forced marriages, including two from Washington State. Two agreed to speak on the record to the Northwest Progressive Institute and describe their escapes.
Here’s Kate’s story:
My name is Kate Yang. I am the twelve year old bride from Washington State. I am Hmong American.
I am a mother and I am a child marriage survivor. At age eleven, my parents moved me to the Washington State to live with relatives. I was given less than twenty-four hours notice to depart.
At age twelve, I became a twelve-year-old bride.
I was given a child marriage, and I was sold for $6,000.
From the start to end of my child marriage, for eleven years, I was mentally, sexually, and physically abused on a daily basis by my child marriage husband. At age fourteen, I suffered a miscarriage due to beatings from my child marriage husband.
At age fifteen, I gave birth to my first child. At age seventeen, I gave birth to my second child and graduated from high school in Kirkland, Washington. I was a prisoner in the only community that I knew, the Hmong community. The abuse was so bad that the thought of ending my life felt like it could be freedom.
At age twenty-two, I started my first quarter at the University of Washington. They say that knowledge is power.
[Among the] many things that the University of Washington taught me is that I am enough, and smart enough, to save myself from my child marriage, my prison. I realized in that moment that help was not coming, that I needed to find the courage to save myself.
I had to at least try to do it for my children.
I found my voice for the first time after eleven years of abuse at age twenty-three. I picked up the phone, I dialed 911 for the first time, and I escaped with my children.
I am blessed to be here today, and blessed to be able to share my story with all of you. I would like to thank the two nonprofits who have provided me with mental health support during this time.
Thank you to Unchained At Last and Project Be Free from Renton, Washington. I am forever grateful. As a child marriage survivor, I’m here today to let the American people know that child marriage does exist in America, that child marriage does exist in Washington State, and that child marriage does exist in Kirkland, Washington, the home of Costco. Please help us end child marriage. Thank you.
And here’s Stephanie’s story:
My name is Stephanie, and I am a survivor of forced marriage. I was married just after my twentieth birthday, and I was born and raised inside of the fundamentalist evangelical movement where girls are groomed and trained to be wife [wives] and mothers and so when that time came I met my husband when I was eighteen and we were we were married by the time we were twenty. We knew that if we didn’t get married we would lose our entire community of people.
So, although I wasn’t forced with, you know, I didn’t have anything, I didn’t have a gun against me or anything like that, but I was forced and coerced because my community said this was my job, this was my calling as a woman, to honor God by getting married and having kids. So, that’s what I did.
I remember talking to my mom and dad and saying, I want to go to college and they told me that’s not, you know, you’re, you’re not smart enough… you’re going to get married and you’re so beautiful — God gave you beauty so that you’d find a husband.
So I got married and we had kids. I have three kids and we stayed in the church for a really long time. And we… I don’t, I don’t say that people leave the evangelical church. I say that people escape it because when you leave you lose everything and I lost my family.
I lost my faith family. We lost our friends. And this was about four years ago. In fact, February will be four years. But it’s imperative. I mean, I knew three girls, growing up that got married, one at fifteen, one at and two at seventeen. And one was never heard from again and the other used my wedding as a way to escape her abuser, who took her to Florida and beat her every day for two years.
So, it’s so important that HB 1455 get passed, because although I was twenty, this would have impacted the girls that I knew. And this is still going on. The archaic ways, the patriarchal ways. Misogynist ways are still being taught inside the walls of evangelical churches and it’s being used as a way of conversion therapy for the queer community, so it’s imperative that this be passed.
NPI thanks these incredibly brave survivors for speaking out and advocating for this important, necessary legislation. Securing the passage of House Bill 1455 is a top legislative priority for our team in 2024, and we look forward to getting this bill to Governor Jay Inslee’s desk so it can be signed into law.
