Should there be a different type of marriage category for younger teens?

Several states in the US have been eliminating marriages for persons under the age of 18.

We are lawmakers from 5 states that finally put an end to child marriage. It's past time for the other 45 US states to follow our lead.

There are some reasons for that which are understandable. Entering into a marriage can take away certain legal rights and trap a young girl into a marriage.

However, there is also the issue of sexual consent.

The society could of course eliminate the concept of legal marriages while still keeping the religious or social aspect of those marriages. But what it comes down to is the issue of sexual consent, because in many situations it would be illegal for the man to have sex with the girl because of her age unless they were married.

Should we come up with a different category of legal marriage? An entirely separate category designed for those under the age of 18 which would allow them to get married and legally have sexual relations with the person they are married to, but still not take any legal rights away from them?

This argument that child marriage should be banned because it traps women into marriage seems to be based on an all-or-nothing perspective. The disadvantages of marriage for the girl cited in the argument in the article do not necessarily have to apply to a marriage.
So it seems like an illogical argument, if the society is capable of developing a different type of temporary legal marriage.

Keep in mind the argument being made in this thread isn't specifically about whether child marriage is a good thing or should be allowed. The argument being made in this thread is that one of the main arguments against it doesn't necessarily need to apply.
Please understand what exactly this thread is about and the issue it is focusing on before you reply.

In a child marriage, typically there might be some minimum age, like 13, and consent would have to be given from the girl herself, both her parents, and a special judge. A social worker would be assigned to review the case to make sure the girl was not being coerced in any way. There might be another minimum age, like 16, where the girl could get married without the consent of her parents if the judge determined it was not a bad situation for her.

A separate new category of legal marriage might be able to give a girl under the age of 18 protections without forcing her into any legal obligations. This would be a temporary legal form of marriage and might expire when she is 21, automatically converting into a standard marriage unless she has decided to end it.

There would also of course probably need to be some limits on this type of marriage. Like the girl would only be permitted to enter into one of these marriage in her lifetime (or maybe two, in exceptional cases). We don't want to turn these temporary marriages into just an excuse for the girl to be able to go around legally having sex with older men. That definitely isn't want the marriage exception to the age of sexual consent is supposed to be about.

Any thoughts about this topic?

 

Being legally emancipated by the courts, if it doesnt already, should include the right to consent to sexual relations.

I oppose the institution of marriage in general as its just an invitation to the state into your relationship with your partner. Wed whomever you want (consenting adults, of course) and leave the state out of it. The only obligation the state should have in the relationship is to protect children from predators, which is reasonably well accomplished by limiting such relationships to legal adults.

 

A good point, but an argument can also be made that marriage should be permitted before the minimum age of legal emancipation.

In Mexican culture, it's common for a young girl who has entered into a marriage to continue living in the parents house for a while until she is an adult. Either the parents of the husband or commonly with her parents, even if her husband is mainly living in a different house. Marriage doesn't always come with the immediate independence that many people usually envision. Mexican culture is much more family oriented.

 

'Mexico does it' is not what I consider a valid argument

The situation you describe doesn't sound to me like any form of informed consent by an adult, but rather manufactured consent designed to stunt young people's (especially young women's, in practice) development, preventing them from becoming an independent adult capable of consent and keep them instead as an ignorantly oppressed dependent for life.

In a perfect world, I think everyone would be required to demonstrate the attainment of independence, both emotional and material, prior to being allowed to consent to become co-dependent with anyone else. But then again, you can't force people to be independent, that would ultimately be self-defeating. But certainly we should be protecting them from being prevented from attaining independent.

 

Oh, and why not? The US has a huge percent of its population now who was born in Mexico, or whose parents were born in Mexico (or some other similar Latin American country).

 

Some girls want to begin having sex and be in a long-term relationship before they reach the age of 18. You can argue whether or not that's a good thing for them, but that is different from the issue of whether they should have the right to do so.

Situations where the girl is being pushed or coerced into the marriage are bad, and should be prevented.
There is a reason why such marriages require the consent of more people than only the girl and her would-be husband.

 

Because this isn't Mexico, this is the USA. The ones that arent coming here just to be parasites are coming here because the USA is better than Mexico, or they would stay in Mexico.

 

If being legally emancipated by the courts included allowing them to freely consent to sexual relations, then all they would need to do is become legally emancipated by the courts. Thats why I think thats how it should work.

 

Yeah, sorry to tell you but for the most part the US has not been getting Mexico's "best and brightest".

A while back I even saw some very interesting statistics that showed that the fertility rates of Mexicans in the US was even higher than the average of what it is in Mexico itself. (Despite the fact that moving from Mexico to the US would be expected to make it more likely for fertility rates go down. This sounds like a complete paradox, until one realizes that the US was getting a disproportionate amount of the part of Mexico's population who had higher fertility rates in the first place.)

 

I'd like you to make that argument because you haven't.

 

True, but that has nothing to do with our age-of-consent laws and rather everything to do with an agenda to unbalance our social safety nets and artificially manufacture a crisis to bring about authoritarian collectivism. There's still plenty of folks who come here because they think we're better than Mexico.

 

I think the two are not necessarily the same.

There are some girls who should be allowed to get legally emancipated but who should not be allowed to marry yet, and then there are other girls who the reverse may be true.

(Yes, they are similar, and there is probably going to be a lot of overlap, but the two are not quite exactly the same thing)

 

If we have millions of girls coming from a culture where getting married at age 15 is not unnormal, and half of them start popping out babies by the time they are 16 or 17, should we tell them they are not allowed to be married yet?

 

Any system is going to have to generalize to a degree and won't work for everyone. The real 'age of consent' differs for all individuals and probably ranges from around 11 to around 30. A system that attempts to protect everyone without oppressing anyone would be prohibitvely expensive, requiring substantial and prolongued psychological evaluation for everyone. I'm confident we don't want to subject ourselves to that, nor pay for it.

I think 18 is a good general compromise, where most people will be protected but not oppressed, and allowing for individuals to seek exemption prior to that sufficiently alleviates a satisfactory amount of the oppression inherent in the attempt to protect.

 

That's true, of course, but we can still try to custom tailor the laws so that the system works for a greater number of people and situations.

That is often going to involve adding more complicated exceptions to the laws, and using creative thinking.

Yes, obviously there is an issue of inherent trade-off here.
The question is if we can better optimize the law, to find ways of mitigating some of the problems without having to completely ban something altogether.

 

No. But we should try to prevent them from being coerced into marriage. This would be best accomplished in the courts when they apply to become emancipated.

 

I was just pointing out that there are many ways to help prevent that from happening without completely banning those marriages altogether.

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

I personally don't think the right to marry should be automatically connected to becoming emancipated, no questions asked.
But yes, the two might often take place in the court at the same time, in some situations.

 

I don't think we can, at the moment, afford to increase resources for this. Perhaps in the future, after we settle the various agendas being pushed to financially devastate our nation into submittance to global authority, and once we return to a state of self-motivated prosperity, then we can start looking at more expensive options to reduce the oppressive generalizations inherent in our current system. But for now, we have bigger things to worry about. My original proposition to simply include sexual freedom in legal emanicpation would be a good (and cheap) bandaid to improve it bit, for now.

 

What resources are those?
Are you saying it's too expensive to have a court involved to determine if that marriage is really a good thing in a specific situation, so all of those marriages should just be conveniently banned?

I can imagine there might be some Romeo and Juliet situations where a couple truly love each other and want to get married, and the parents would have totally given their consent, but the man will end up going to prison and labeled a sex offender.
That will probably end up involving a lot more "resources" than one appearance in front of a judge and a casual investigation by a social worker, so the two could have just simply gotten married in the first place.

Simple cookie-cutter laws are not always cheaper. They can often end up being a lot more expensive.

 

When someone applies to become emancipated, the court attempts to ascertain whether they are of a sufficient level of maturity to actually be emancipated. I'm sure this process varies from state to state and from judge to judge, but generally, it should be reasonably effective for the courts to include a 'is this person reasonably capable of sexually consenting or not' judgement, and denying emancipation to those not deemed capable of making such a decision for themselves.

 

I'm saying its too expensive to sufficiently evaluate everyone on an indivudal basis to determine when each person has reached a level of emotional maturity sufficient to consent to sex (or marriage). Everything between that and the current system requires some additional amount of manpower which will have to be paid for by the state. As it is now, it will be paid for by inflating our currency more. We shouldn't do that right now.

 

I totally understand what you're saying, but I'm just saying the two are not necessarily the same thing.

If I was a judge there could be all sorts of situations where I would be okay allowing a girl to be emancipated but I would not be okay approving her entering into a marriage with a certain guy. It's still possible for girls to be coerced or exploited even if they are emancipated.
Likewise there could be many situations where the girl should be allowed to get married to a certain guy and begin having sex, but she is not mature enough to be granted emancipation.

 

This is not just an issue about emotional maturity. There are many other factors. Like who the guy is, what the situation is, what the parents think about the proposed marriage.

Even the financial resources and responsibility of the man may be taken into account. No judge is going to grant the marriage if this guy has a history of just sleeping with lots of girls and then dumping them.

 

Look, I totally see what you're getting at, and I would usually agree with that type of logic, but I just do not think that would be the case here. We are talking about a marriage, something that will likely be a one-time event in someone's life. I don't think it would be too expensive. It would just involve an hour of a judge's time and a half day of work from a social worker.

We're not talking about having to get special approval every time a girl feels like having casual sex with some guy. That would be totally different.

 

Please explain what legal rights are taken away and how the young girl is trapped into a marriage. Also with that, how a young male is affected (loss of rights and being trapped), or why he is not.

That really depends upon what legal benefits you wish to have in society. Certainly parental rights are not, or at least should not be, dependent upon the legal status of marriage. With that said, are you saying that all of the other benefits that are currently part of marriage should not exist? If they should, then by what mechanism should we have them if the government should not be involved in marriage? Also what requirements are there that legal marriage should necessarily match in any way with social or religious marriage?

Assuming that we continue to allow legal marriage at such ages below 18, why does a separate category or type of marriage need to be made? Given the argument of not legally allowed to do this and that, would it not be simpler to set a law that automatically emancipates a minor when they get married? If the issue is that they cannot do certain adult things to get out of a bad marriage, then allow them to do those adult things.

To a point I will agree with you, insofar as the presented argument itself goes. I can agree with a position and still point out bad arguments made towards that position. However, depending upon the amount of times a given situation occurs, it may be better to allow for individuals to apply for an exception than to allow it wholesale.

I get this. I have made threads in the past that addresses a specific against a thing, even if I am for that thing overall. (or vice versa)