LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – In Michigan, there is technically no minimum age required under the law in order to get married. All that is needed for people under 18 to enter into holy matrimony is the signature of a parent or guardian.
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Last week, Michigan Rep. Kara Hope (D-Holt) and State Senator Sarah Anthony held a press conference and re-introduced legislation to end child marriage and raise the minimum age to 18 with no exceptions. They said their hope is to get the legislation passed this year and signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Courtney Kosnik, who was at the press conference spoke out about the issue as a child marriage survivor. She said, “I didn’t understand what I was giving up. At 16, I already had three full-ride scholarships to pre-med,” said Courtney Kosnik, who was married at 16. I had plans. And that all changed the day I married him. He began physically, sexually, and emotionally abusing me on our wedding night, and it continued for 23 years.”
State Senator Sarah Anthony said, “Child marriage in Michigan has destroyed and derailed the lives of so many adolescents in our state…” She said that children as young as 12-years-old have been married in the state and that children have “no protections or recourse to get out of these situations and often times those situations are plagued with abuse as well as domestic violence.”
Hope, an attorney, said that child marriage is not just an old law on the books in the state, it’s still being practiced.
Unchained at Last, a non-profit organization trying to end child marriage in the United States, reports that in Michigan, 5,259 children under the age of 18 were married between 2000 and 2018. And in the entire country, almost 300,000 children under the age of 18 were legally married between the same years. 1,331 of these children were 13-years-old or younger and 78% of the total child marriages in the country involved a minor girl marring an adult male.
Unchained at Last Founder/Executive Director Fraidy Reiss spoke at the press conference and said that she founded the group because she found herself trapped in a marriage she was forced to enter into by her parents and she wanted to help others. She said her organization has been able to help about 900 individuals in Michigan to escape their forced marriages.
Unfortunately, most of those individuals who they helped were adults because without changing legislation to make child marriage illegal, their hands are tied to help the children. She said it’s only when the children turn 18 that they have the rights of adulthood. She said, “If you are not yet 18 in Michigan, if you leave home, police can take you back home or you can be placed in a juvenile home or a county jail. You don’t have the legal right to open your front door and leave. We, as advocates, if we help somebody under age 17 to escape, we could be criminally prosecuted. We can be fined up to $500 and imprisoned for up to a year.”
Senate Bill 0210, which establishes the minimum age to marry in Michigan as 18, is part of a four-bill package that was introduced on March 16th. The bills were referred to the Committee on Civil Rights, Judiciary and Public Safety.
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