America Has a Massive Child Marriage Problem

In the US nearly every state allows child marriage. In some there are even loopholes that allow child rapists to avoid prosecution by marrying the person they raped. In others parents can, in effect, force their children to get married.

It’s a global issue - one in five girls around the world is married as a child - but you might be surprised to know that nearly 250,000 children were married in the US in the first ten years of this century.

In this So What we look at child marriage in the US, why it’s legal and what campaigners are doing to tackle what they see as child abuse.