Genevieve Meyer describes her childhood in the 1980s as being filled with “a lot of violence, a lot of volatility and a lot of instability.” She was raised in Southern California by a single mom who suffered significant mental health issues and, later, she had an abusive stepfather. She stopped going to school after sixth grade, never went to medical appointments and often fielded questions from social service workers called to the house. By 14, Meyer spent a lot of her free time wandering around the surrounding desert, avoiding her home. That’s how she befriended a neighbor, a divorced father with two children who was 28 years older than her.
“He kind of started grooming me after he figured out that I didn’t want to be at home,” Meyer said.
When her mom found out about the relationship, she called the police, who arrested the neighbor for “lewd sexual acts” — charges that were later dropped. Meyer insisted she was not sexually active, but her mom believed she was likely to become pregnant and that marriage was the only option. The neighbor agreed out of fear of losing custody of his children, and Meyer was told she would be allowed to return to school if she went along.
“I thought, here’s my opportunity because that’s all I really wanted – I just wanted a normal adolescent life,” said Meyer, now 46. “I wanted to play sports, and I wanted to hang out with people my own age. I don’t think I really understood marriage. I think I saw it as just kind of a piece of paper and a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Meyer’s mom tried to get her daughter married in California, then Nevada and then Utah — all without success due to differing laws and one judge refusing because of the couple’s age difference. So Meyer’s neighbor borrowed an RV and drove her to Mississippi. With her mother’s written consent, the state’s only other requirement to obtain a marriage license was to get blood tests checking for sexually transmitted infections. No one asked Meyer any other questions before a judge in a courthouse read some words from a book and pronounced them married. She was 15. He was 43.
A bill that aims to prevent child marriage like Meyer’s is expected to be introduced in both the House and Senate on Thursday. The legislation — cosponsored by Democrats Reps. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin and Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois in the House and Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Brian Schatz of Hawaii in the Senate — was first introduced in 2024 and is the first concerted effort by Congress to condemn and prevent child marriage domestically.
“I don’t think people realize that child marriages do occur in the United States, so I want to build awareness with this bill,” Moore told The 19th. “And also it’s just part of my wheelhouse of trying to stop violence against women. This is just yet another piece of that puzzle.”
Under the U.S. Constitution, only individual states can set minimum age requirements for marriage. The federal government has no authority over family or domestic law, but it does have control over immigration laws related to spousal and fiancé visas. This bill — first shared with The 19th in an exclusive — would act as “a practical roadmap” for states to end child marriage, Moore said.
“Our bill builds on the work of countless survivors and advocates across the country to ban child marriage in the United States,” Durbin said in a statement. “We must enact this legislation at a federal level to protect the future of hundreds of thousands of young girls who have been stripped of their independence.”
About 300,000 minors — the vast majority of them girls — were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2018, the year statehouses began taking action. Child marriage is defined as any marriage where at least one of the parties is under the age of 18. Prior to 2018, child marriage was legal in all 50 states. As of 2026, 17 states have passed bans while advocates continue to push lawmakers to end the practice in states and on the federal level.
“I thought that what happened to me was just a random fluke, like a crack somewhere that only I fell through,” Meyer said. “But I was stunned to learn how many children were married. And it wasn’t the close-in-age teenage lovebirds. It was more like my situation with the big age gap and weird stuff.”
Meyer, who said she was abused in that marriage, got a divorce after seven years. Now, she lives in Indiana with her third husband and consults on a statewide human trafficking task force and advocates for victims of gender-based violence and abuse.
“There’s literally no good outcomes for child marriage,” Meyer said. “We legislate everything else: We decide when kids can stop going to school, when they can get their driver’s license, when they can smoke, when they can drink, when they can sign up for the military. But putting them between systems where there’s absolutely no protection, where they’re not going to get their coaches, their peers, their school, their doctor, child services — none of those support systems — and handing them over to an adult? It’s crazy.”
The 19th spoke to half a dozen child marriage survivors and advocates who for years consulted with lawmakers, informing core provisions in the legislation and identifying loopholes to close.
Here are some strategies laid out in the bill:
Educate the public
Casey Carter Swegman, the director of public policy at the Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit that serves immigrant survivors of gender-based violence, said she’s been working with Durbin’s office since 2019 on this legislation.
“No matter how much outreach and education we think we’ve done, it feels like every week we still have a conversation with someone who is completely unaware that child marriage is happening in the United States and that it’s legal,” Swegman said. “And it’s happening to folks of all backgrounds, religious faiths, immigration status, socioeconomic status — it really does not discriminate.”
Swegman said introducing legislation like this is first and foremost an education tool.
“Children are being married in this country every day,” Swegman said. “And the more people learn about it, the more outrage we have, the more voices at the table, the more likely we are to make change.”
Close an immigration loophole
Currently, there is no minimum age for someone to sponsor a spousal or fiancé visa; there is also no minimum age for how old a foreign-born spouse or fiancé must be to be eligible for that visa. Swegman said Tahirih social workers and advocates have worked with thousands of young girls in America who are forced to marry and then sponsor the visas of older men from abroad, as well as thousands of children who are brought to the United States under the guise of spousal visas to marry men decades older than them.
Between 2007 and 2017, more than 8,500 marriage-based visa petitions involving at least one child were approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, according to findings by a Senate committee. The majority of these involved adult men seeking to bring girls from overseas as brides or fiancées.
The bill would require U.S. petitioners for spousal and fiancé visas to be at least 18 and to have been 18 or older at the time of marriage to a foreign visa beneficiary. It would also require beneficiaries to be at least 18 when the petition is filed except in limited circumstances.
Naila Amin was 4 years old when she moved from a rural village in Pakistan to New York City. She was 7 when her auntie pinned her down to pierce her nose in preparation for a nath, the traditional nose ring worn by brides. She was 8 when she was told that she was engaged.
“My dad told his oldest brother that he could have me for his son, who was 13 years older than me,” said Amin, now 36. “Like I was a piece of cow, like I was cattle or something.”
Amin said because she had a U.S. passport, her family just saw her as a vehicle for her fiancé to get out of Pakistan. At the time, New York law said children had to be at least 14 with parental permission to get married. (New York officially banned child marriage in 2021 with the passage of Naila’s Law, named after Amin.)
“Having the immigration piece [in this bill] is so important because we are literally laundering children through our U.S. immigration system,” Amin said. “It’s human trafficking.”
Repeal the consummation requirement in proxy marriages
In proxy marriages — ceremonies where one of the parties is not physically present — consummation is currently required to validate the union. This bill would repeal this condition, which advocates argue incentivizes rape, and instead require the parties to have met in person within two years before the wedding date.
Sasha Taylor, a child marriage survivor and advocate, insisted that this provision was included in the bill. As an immigrant from Pakistan with American citizenship, she sees proxy marriages in a lot of Asian and other immigrant communities in the United States. Often, Taylor said the girl is not even present to consent to the marriage and someone else speaks on her behalf.
When she was 15, Taylor was forced by her parents to marry a stranger seven years her senior because he needed her to sponsor his visa to stay in the United States. Her family’s reputation relied on her strict obedience and submission to the marriage — a phenomenon that she calls “honor-based violence.”
“If they say you’re going to marry this person and you refuse, that’s going to break the honor of the family within a community structure,” Taylor said. “Girls can get viciously abused by the collective family, embarrassed in the community or she can even get killed for it. That is absolutely happening in immigrant communities in the United States.”
Prohibit child marriage from occurring on federal property
The bill would prohibit child marriage from occurring in or on property owned by or funded by the federal government, including military bases in the United States and abroad.
Swegman said she is aware that child brides live on military bases, which she described as “some of the most isolated spaces for survivors that you can think of.”
Use grant funding as an incentive
The bill would provide states that end child marriage with increased grant funding from the Office on Violence Against Women. It would also establish grant programs for states that have not yet ended child marriage to create task force forces to support advocates and survivors.
“Right now, we have survivors, advocates and others who are doing this work for free, who are doing child marriage advocacy work without funding and really pushing a very heavy boulder up a hill,” Swegman said. “Those state task forces would allow them to be focused and enable homegrown movements to make progress.”
Point to a standard model
The bill would instruct the attorney general to promulgate a model state statute that prohibits child marriage.
Judy Wiegand, a child marriage survivor based in Kentucky and now advocate, said she was most excited that this provision was included in the bill because she would like to see standardized guidelines across different states. The reason, Wiegand said, is that families stymied by one state’s marriage laws simply find another destination.
“They’re playing hopscotch with which state they can go to,” she said.
Wiegand also said some states with existing bans, like Kentucky, need more direction on how to enforce them. In 2018, Kentucky raised its minimum marriage age to 18 with a loophole that allows 17-year-olds to marry with parental and judicial approval after Wiegand shared her story in front of state lawmakers. She was married at 13 after she was sexually assaulted. She got pregnant and was forced by her parents and small-town community to marry the person who assaulted her, who then became her abuser.
Wiegand, now 62, said she was surprised to see that child marriages were still happening in Kentucky. About 141 cases of child marriage — more than a dozen of which were illegal — have reportedly occurred in the state since 2018. She said there are some county court clerks that are continuing to allow children under the age of 17 to obtain marriage licenses.
“This is my understanding based on what I’ve seen this year,” Wiegand said. “Exceptions are being made without following any of the laws set in place, and they’re not being held accountable for doing so.”
Establish a national commission to study the issue
The commission would evaluate and report on eliminating child marriage in the country.
The bill would also require the Government Accountability Office to examine the extent to which U.S. citizens and permanent residents sponsor foreign spouses who are under 18 at the time of marriage and make recommendations.
Donna Simmons, a child marriage survivor in Kentucky, said more studies need to be conducted to better understand all of the factors that contribute to child marriage and perpetuate harms against girls and women. Simmons was a 14-year-old patient at a behavioral health facility when she met a 29-year-old mental health technician who worked there. He groomed her, they started a relationship and two years later, he paid her mom $1,000 to get married to avoid statutory rape charges. He went on to traffic her at strip clubs for years.
Simmons, now 42, started advocating for other girls and women survivors and in 2018, helped Kentucky set the marital minimum age to 17.
“Back in 2016, I started working in the advocacy space because I started realizing that it wasn’t just that I was a bad kid that bad things happened to,” Simmons said. “It was that the system had a huge responsibility in protecting me and failed at every angle.”
Even though she was legally emancipated because she was married, Simmons was not qualified for many jobs, could not lease an apartment under her name and was even turned away from a domestic violence shelter because she was still a minor. She said she felt like she was stuck with her trafficker until she turned 18 — but didn’t leave him until she was 19 and finalized the divorce at 20.
“One of the reasons that studies are so important is because we need to make sure that people understand, we need to humanize what child marriage actually means,” Simmons said.
Girls who marry before they turn 19 are more likely to drop out of high school and four times less likely to graduate from college. (Simmons never finished her sophomore year.) They are associated with higher poverty rates in life and increased psychiatric disorders, and they have a greater risk of developing serious health conditions.
And the risk lingers for following generations: Simmons’ own mother was 13 when she married an older man who had served in two wars and had two sons already.
“If we ever want to stop these cycles of generational trauma, like ongoing poverty and chronic health conditions, we cannot possibly get there if we continue to sanction marriages that involve children and ultimately perpetuate these cycles,” Simmons said.
