By KATHARINE WEBSTER, InDepthNH.org
A bill that would exempt 17-year-olds on active military duty or their partners from a new state law banning underage marriage drew emotional testimony from both sides on Tuesday.
Rep. Margaret Drye, R-Plainfield, says she sponsored House Bill 433 so that the nonmilitary spouses of service members can qualify for spouse-only benefits, including health care, military housing and certain survivor’s benefits. The bill requires the 17-year-old’s parents to give their permission for the marriage, just as the military requires parental permission for a 17-year-old to enlist, she said.
“This provides a narrowly crafted exception for those who put their lives on the line for our country,” Drye told members of the House Children and Family Law Committee, referring to a law banning marriage under age 18 with no exceptions. The law took effect Jan. 1.
As the mother of two sons deployed to Iraq, Drye said she knows that service members can rest easier if they know that their loved ones back home are provided for.
Other Representatives and cosponsors testified that they had married before they turned 18 or knew others who had. Rep. Terry Roy, R-Deerfield, chairman of the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee and a cosponsor of the bill, said he joined the Army at age 17.
While Roy said he doesn’t think “getting married at 17 is a great idea,” he urged the committee members to look at the bill from the point of view of a 17-year-old girl who gets pregnant by her boyfriend in the military and worries about how she’s going to access prenatal care and health care for herself and her child.
“I can see the reason for this exception,” he said. “Right now, there could be a pregnant woman in New Hampshire who is wondering how she’s going to care for that child.”
Rep. Harry Bean, R-Gilford, also advocated for the bill, saying that as long as an underage teen’s parents give their permission, marriage under the age of 18 should be allowed. Bean says that he and his wife married at age 16 and have stayed together for 53 years and counting.
“Marriage under the age of 18 works if two people are committed, and parents ought to know their children,” he said.
But two military veterans testified that there should be no exceptions to the underage marriage ban, saying that the partner who is 17 years old has limited rights as a minor that make it very difficult to escape an abusive situation – and that parents don’t always have their children’s best interests at heart.
Retired Army Specialist Brittany Wright, who flew in from San Diego to testify against the bill, said she did so both as a veteran and as a survivor of sexual abuse by an older military spouse.
Wright said that in 2013, after she ran away to escape the man who had been grooming, molesting and raping her since she was 14 years old, police returned her to her parents, who then forced her to marry her abuser.
Child marriage gave the man “the power … to marry me at 17 years old and walk away from a number of criminal charges with a child bride he could then legally rape,” she said.
Wright said she was unable to divorce him until she turned 18 because she didn’t have the legal rights, training and resources of an adult, she said. The divorce left her homeless, but by age 21, she had obtained her GED and joined the Army Military Police Corps.
Wright said she served in the Army for seven years because she loves her country, but also “to rebuild the life that child marriage stole from me.” She called underage marriage an invitation to abusers to groom girls and their parents.
“Do not thank me for my service if you plan to use it as an excuse to justify the abuses that occur if we allow child marriage in our society under any circumstances,” she said.
Committee Chair Mark Pearson, R-Hampstead, thanked Wright for her testimony and asked if her situation might not have been similar if she had been 18 when she married, instead of 17. She said it would not.
Being 18 “would have meant that I’d have access to divorce (and) would have meant that I would have had access to health care without the permission of my spouse, who was clearly not interested in my wellbeing,” Wright responded.
Shelley Hoyt, a retired Air Force major from Hopkinton, N.H., who volunteered to work at a crisis center while serving in Okinawa, Japan, said that there are several dangers for underage spouses of service members, including a transient lifestyle that leaves them isolated and the differences between civil law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Under the military’s legal code, a commanding officer has the sole power to determine whether and how to discipline someone in their unit who violates military law, she said.
Hoyt cited the case of a female Marine who was raped by a male Marine in her own bed and “did everything right,” screaming, fighting back, calling police, submitting to an exam and filing a report – only to see her attacker let off with no punishment because his commanding officer determined that it would “unfairly mar the clean record of a Marine who had a promising future.”
“If this is how they respond to violence against one of their own, a fellow Marine, how highly do you think they are going to value a 17-year-old child from New Hampshire?” Hoyt said.
Fraidy Reiss, founder of the nonprofit Unchained at Last, an organization that campaigns against underage marriage, traveled from New Jersey to testify against the bill. She said research shows that 70% to 80% of underage marriages end in divorce.
Erin Hearn, a volunteer with Unchained at Last in Massachusetts, which banned marriage under 18 in 2022, said that underage marriage is widely recognized as child abuse because minors cannot take independent legal action. That limits their options for leaving an abuser, as most domestic violence shelters are set up for adults and youth shelters usually only allow for short-term stays, she said.
“A minor who runs away from home … there’s nowhere for them to go,” she said. “Domestic violence shelters across the U.S. routinely turn away minors, even emancipated minors.”
