California’s struggle to end child marriage

Thirteen years ago, President Obama proclaimed child marriage “a threat to fundamental human rights.” Two years later, in 2015, the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted its first resolution formally recognizing child marriage as a human rights violation. Beginning in 2018, 17 states — including solidly red Missouri and Oklahoma — have banned the practice.

Yet it wasn’t until the last day of September this year that California, a proud bastion of progressive politics that’s often touted as a national laboratory for forward thinking public policy, became the 18th state to outlaw child marriage.

“California has been debating this issue of child marriage for nearly a decade,” said Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, D-Santa Cruz, the author of AB 1267, which sets the minimum age of 18 for marriage in the Golden State with no exceptions.

“Even if one child is married off to an older man, that is a problem,” Pellerin said.

But not one that seemed urgent to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who waited until the signing deadline on Sept. 30 to ink his name to it.

Child marriage, which the advocacy organization Unchained At Last found overwhelmingly involves underage girls in the United States, can deprive participants of personal agency and circumvent statutory rape laws.

In the parts of the country where it is legal, parental consent is generally required alongside approval from a judge or court clerk, lending the practice a veneer of informed consent. But critics, including the U.N. Committees on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and on the Rights of the Child, consider it the same as forced marriage.

The consent of children, with their limited legal rights, can be coerced.

Similarly, statutory rape laws prohibit sexual activity in the United States when one of the participants is below the age of consent. Under those laws, the sex does not have to be forced because minors, by definition, are not legally able to consent to it.

Many statutory rape laws, however, include martial exemptions excusing sexual acts between spouses, creating a loophole for child marriage that legitimizes otherwise criminal behavior. That’s why Equality Now says child marriage is a “get out of jail free” card for predators.

“It is insane to me and absurd to me as well as clearly immoral and unethical that we permit children to be married,” Chelsea Clinton said in Los Angeles last year at an event discussing child marriage in California.

“When we ask children, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I think hopefully any of us would be horrified if a 5 year old, instead of answering like ‘I want to be an astronaut’ or a human rights lawyer or a doctor, is like, ‘I want to be a bride at 14,’” Clinton said, seven months before Pellerin amended AB 1267 to ban child marriage in California.

Fraidy Reiss, founder and executive director of Unchained At Last, appeared on stage with Clinton at UCLA’s Hammer Museum.

“The U.S. State Department designates child marriage as a ‘human rights abuse’ for a reason: It destroys nearly every aspect of a girl’s life, including her health, education, economic opportunities, physical safety and sexual and reproductive rights,” Reiss said in a statement provided to Capitol Weekly. “It also creates a nightmarish legal trap, due to minors’ limited legal rights; indeed, all marriage before age 18 is recognized globally as forced marriage, which is a form of modern slavery. It creates legal workarounds for statutory rape laws and human trafficking laws. This is why we at Unchained At Last and our allies are pushing relentlessly in California and across the U.S. for a marriage age of 18, no exceptions.”

Child marriage persists in parts of the United States because some argue that total bans undermine parental rights or religious liberty, or could prevent teen parents from raising their children or encourage teen abortions.

Ban opponents also worry that broad restrictions could unintentionally limit minors’ access to reproductive healthcare or infringe on their autonomy or constitutional rights. In 2017, the American Civil Liberties Union raised such arguments when former Sen. Jerry Hill proposed banning child marriage in California.

“Even if one child is married off to an older man, that is a problem.”

Hill subsequently amended his proposal, SB 273, to merely impose additional requirements and court oversight before minors may marry or enter into a domestic partnership. Pellerin said advocates didn’t like that compromise because they were worried that once it was passed everyone would think the issue was solved.

“We have talked to survivors who under this law that we set up in 2017” were told by their parents “‘you’re marrying this guy’ and they had their interview with the judge and they lied to the judge and repeated what their parent told them to say,” the assemblymember said. “So, that was not a good move for California, to do the compromise. It did, I think, set us back because people felt like we addressed it.”

The ACLU also opposed Pellerin’s bill this year, and advocates reportedly were worried about Planned Parenthood opposition as well, although that never materialized. Planned Parenthood was neutral on AB 1267. The ACLU was the only registered opponent of AB 1267 after a gut-and-amend made it a ban on child marriage in June.

The bill passed without any registered no votes.

Pellerin credited the bill’s success this year to the work of survivors like longtime Californian Christina Sutton, who told the Senate and Assembly Judiciary committees that she was pressured into marrying a 22-year-old man when she was 16.

“You’re not talking about a relationship that had balance to it,” Sutton, 49, told Capitol Weekly.  “He had the upper hand in everything.”

Sutton said she was married in Napa County in 1994. She described herself as “a very white woman who was raised in a very white household that was very Christian,” which she said should dispel any misconceptions that child marriage is limited to minorities or people who practice certain religions.

“It is definitely a cross-demographic problem,” she said. “You’re a plaything, essentially, for the older person,” she said.

The ACLU didn’t respond to a request for comment while Planned Parenthood declined to comment.

In July, when the California Legislature was pushing AB 1267 through the process before the end-of-session deadline, U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wisconsin, introduced HR 9758, the Child Marriage Prevention Act of 2026, which seeks to ban child marriages nationwide, although it includes an exception for 16- and 17-year-olds to marry in some limited cases. Similar proposals were introduced and failed in 2018 and 2024.

“I think that there is momentum for this,” Pellerin said of a federal ban on child marriage. “It needs to be done.”