Child Marriage Survivors Share Their Stories

Today we are tackling a global issue affecting millions of young girls: Child marriage. Every year, thousands of girls are married off before they turn 18, often without their consent. Globally, one in five girls was married or in an informal union before the age of 18. Child marriage and forced marriage are happening all too often in the United States as well, at alarming rates. Over 300,000 minors were married in the United States between 2000 and 2018, 37 states currently allow children to marry and some have no minimum age for child marriage. On this episode, we are going to be talking to three remarkable women who have survived child marriage and are now leading the fight against it as advocates with Unchained At Last, a national organization and movement dedicated to ending forced and child marriage in the United States. The mission of Unchained at Last is crucial to human rights and women's rights as marriage before 18 often involves coercion, unplanned pregnancies, and stripping minors of the legal rights they need to leave an unwanted marriage.