Girls in their mid-teens get trapped in abusive unions because they can be seen by police as child runaways, get rejected from women s refuges and can be too young to start divorce proceedings.
Dawn Tyree, from California, was forced by her father and step-mother to marry a man 19 years older after he first got her pregnant. By age 16 she had two toddlers and a third child on the way.
âWas like a business transactionâ: Woman married when 13 now advocating to end child marriage
VIDEO: âWas like a business transactionâ Woman married when 13 now advocating to end child marriage By Vania Patino | April 5, 2021 at 10:25 PM CDT - Updated April 6 at 9:19 AM
AMARILLO, Texas (KFDA) - Child marriage may seem like a third world problem, but the issue is very much prevalent in the U.S.
The latest data shows over 200,000 minors were reportedly married to an adult between the years 2010 to 2015 in the United States.
In Texas, over 41,000 minors were reportedly married to adult men between the years 2000 to 2017. Among those, 96 percent are girls married to adult men.
A new attempt to end child marriage in New Hampshire
Cassandra Levesque following a hearing where she spoke in favor of a set of bills related to the age of marriage in 2018. Monitor file
Published: 2/15/2021 3:44:21 PM
Dawn Tyree was a child back in 1985 when she married the man who impregnated her.
A couple years later, after years of physical and sexual abuse, she decided to leave her husband at just 17.
As Tyree made her way into the world as a child herself with two children, she felt stuck. Because she was under 18, she couldn’t enroll back in school or rent a hotel room to escape her ex-husband. Tyree was turned away from shelters and social services because of her age.