OpEd: 'While [Aaliyah] is not with us today, we should honor her as a survivor of child marriage and heed the call of other survivors to end child marriage.'
that don’t require clerks or judges to obtain official proof of someone’s age before granting a marriage license.
But it’s unclear that someone would even need to bother with a fake ID: Upon realizing that a marriage is illegal in their own state, a person could instead simply travel to be married in a jurisdiction with looser laws. In 1994, Kelly could have legally married a 15-year-old just over the border from Illinois in Missouri or Indiana. Still, states including Michigan, where Aaliyah’s family lived at the time, do not have an age floor for marriage.
Fortunately, American survivors of child marriage and their allies are leading a movement to change these laws. Virginia was the first state to take action, in 2016, and since then a total ofto end or limit child marriage. Much work remains to be done, and we continue to push for all states to ultimately end child marriage altogether.
But action is not limited to the states. Congress has an opportunity to remove the federal marriage defense to statutory rape as part of renewing the Violence Against Women Act, and it must seize this moment to do so and set an example for states to follow. Furthermore,that allow adult U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents to obtain fiancée and spousal visas for children overseas also need to be fixed.
It’s a tragedy that the anniversary of Aaliyah’s passing and the resurrection of her full catalog of music have been overshadowed in many ways by Kelly’s trial. While she is not with us today, we should honor her as a survivor of child marriage and heed the call of other survivors to end child marriage.
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