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A bill to ban marriage under the age of 18 awaits a vote on the Assembly floor after passing the Assembly Judiciary Committee Tuesday.
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Currently, California, Mississippi and New Mexico are the only U.S. states that have no minimum age requirement for marriage. In California, a minor may get married if they obtain a court order consenting to the union and parental permission. Assembly Bill 1267 would require a minimum age of 18 to obtain a marriage license, with no exceptions.
Similar legislation failed to pass in 2023 after stalling in a committee hearing, and in 2018 after pushback from the ACLU California Action, which remains opposed to this year’s version of the bill.
As part of its opposition to the 2018 legislation, the ACLU said the measure “unnecessarily and unduly intrudes on the fundamental right of marriage without sufficient cause,” according to reporting by the Los Angeles Times.
Bill author Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, D-Santa Cruz, replaced the language in an earlier, unrelated piece of legislation that would have imposed more regulations on drug treatment facilities but wasn’t moving forward.
“This year, it seemed like everything came together,” Pellerin said. “We’re hearing from survivors, we’re seeing data and we’re building off of the work of my predecessors. It was just the right opportunity to do it this year.”
Pellerin said her time as Santa Cruz County clerk and commissioner of civil marriage inspired her to champion the issue in the Legislature.
“When I was a county clerk, I had a young couple come in to get a marriage license,” Pellerin said. “She was pregnant and she looked scared to death. The person she was marrying was older. It just gave me a bad feeling. They had their parents’ approval and they had gone to the judge, so we did issue the license … but that moment has always stayed with me.”
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The bill and its predecessors have been sponsored by advocacy group Unchained at Last, an organization aiming to end child marriage in the U.S. In 2023, members of the group rallied in support of prior legislation in a “chaining in” demonstration. During the protest, participants wore wedding dresses, duct-taped their mouths and chained their wrists on the Capitol steps to call on lawmakers to pass the measure.
Unchained at Last Director Fraidy Reiss said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee that she is hopeful this year’s bill will be approved by the Assembly — an outcome that would make the group’s advocacy efforts worthwhile.
“I’m originally from California and I’m a forced marriage survivor,” Reiss said. “This is very deeply personal for me. The fact that we had to fight this for nine years of screaming and begging and arguing and cajoling and threatening … that would just make the victory even more sweet.”
According to data from Unchained at Last, nearly 23,600 minors were married in California between 2000 and 2018. In all of these marriages, sex became legal within the marriage; that is, those married were either under the age of consent or sexual relations would have been considered statutory rape if the marriage had not occurred.
“It’s hard to even articulate how huge this is,” Reiss said. “California is the most populous state in the union and a state that prides itself on human rights and girls’ rights. The idea that we have not yet been able to ban child marriage here is a source of great pain and frustration for us and great danger to the millions of girls who live in California.”
Darcy Totten, the executive director of the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls, said child marriage has often allowed adults to evade accountability for crimes like statutory rape and human trafficking. According to Totten’s testimony in a Senate committee hearing, girls who are married as children are at higher risk of domestic violence, homelessness and abuse.
“These minors often end up becoming extremely reliant on their spouse, as they have limited autonomy to do things like hire their own lawyer, seek protective orders, or even stay in domestic violence shelters before they turn 18,” Totten said. “What the marriage does in most of these cases is change the status of the adult male involved from rapist to husband.”
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