Hundreds of Missouri’s 15-year-old brides may have married their rapists

LINK

From 1999 to 2015, more than 1,000 15-year-olds married in Missouri. Of those, The Star’s review of data shows, more than 300 married men age 21 or older, with some in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Assuming they had premarital sex, those grooms would be considered rapists.

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“They wanted me to get married,” Ashley, now 24 and the mother of four, said. “I knew I shouldn’t have been making that decision that young. It was just something they told me that, like, I had to do or my child’s father would go to jail.”

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“The reason why the issue of child marriage is so interesting is that it really forces us to think of what decisions kids are capable of making on their own, and what decisions they actually need to be protected from because they are too young and too vulnerable and they get it wrong,” Oberman said.


Interesting read. Not sure how I feel about it.

ETA it’s the statutory rape laws I don’t know how I feel about, the parents forcing their child into marriage are pieces of shite.