By KATHARINE WEBSTER, InDepthNH.org
Last Christmas Eve, the state Supreme Court upheld two felony sexual assault convictions against Cleve Wilmot, 54, who had been found guilty of repeatedly molesting a girl under 16 who was “not his legal spouse,” according to court documents.
A week later, on New Year’s Day, New Hampshire became the 13th state to ban marriage for anyone under the age of majority – 18 – without exception.
Wilmot’s case and the new law bookend major changes over the past six years in New Hampshire laws involving teen marriage and sexual assault.
When Wilmot was arrested in December 2018, New Hampshire girls as young as 13 years old and boys as young as 14 could get married with permission from their parents and a judge. At the same time, marriage could be used as a defense against charges of sexually assaulting a minor.
A couple of weeks later, on Jan. 1, 2019, a new law took effect raising the marriage age to 16. In 2020, lawmakers passed a bill that, among other updates, removed marriage as a defense in sexual assault cases involving children and teens under 18. And last year, they approved the law that just raised the marriage age to 18.
But a bill introduced this year by state Rep. Margaret Drye, R-Plainfield, would carve out a narrow exception, allowing 17-year-olds to marry with their parents’ permission if they or their intended spouse is on active military duty. High school graduates who are 17 can enlist in any branch of the military with parental permission.
House Bill 433 drew emotional testimony before the House Children and Family Law Committee last week, rekindling the debate over underage marriage. Supporters included Rep. Harry Bean, R-Gilford, who married at age 16, while opponents included women veterans and survivors of child sexual abuse.
So how and why did the marriage and sexual assault laws co-evolve, and where do they stand now? Let’s take a look.
The Criminal Case
Wilmot, a Nashua man who was 48 at the time, was arrested in December 2018 and indicted on seven counts of pattern aggravated felonious sexual assault, one count of aggravated felonious sexual assault and one count of felonious sexual assault against a girl who was 9 when the abuse began and 14 when she reported it to a staff member at Nashua South High School.
To prosecute Wilmot, Hillsborough County attorneys needed to prove that the girl was under 16 and, for the pattern charges, that Wilmot had committed the same sex act over two months and within five years. They also had to prove that Wilmot was more than four years older than the girl, or that she was younger than 13, or that she was younger than 18 and under Wilmot’s control.
Until 2021, Wilmot could have used marriage to the girl as a defense in any of those circumstances.
However, the two were not married, and a jury ultimately convicted Wilmot on two pattern counts, involving hand jobs and oral sex, and the aggravated felonious sexual assault charge for touching the girl’s genitals.
The trial judge dismissed one of the pattern verdicts because of a flaw in the jury instructions, then rejected an attempt by Wilmot’s lawyers to get the remaining pattern verdict reduced to a misdemeanor. The judge sentenced Wilmot to a total of 17½ to 35 years in state prison, and on Christmas Eve, the state Supreme Court upheld the judge’s reasoning, rejecting Wilmot’s appeal.
Today, marriage is no longer a legal defense for an adult accused of sexual assault involving a child younger than 16 or involving a 16- or 17-year-old who is under the adult’s control, for example as a member of the adult’s family or household. That makes such cases easier to prosecute, says state Rep. Cassandra Levesque, D-Barrington.
Before that, prosecutors had to prove that sex within a marriage wasn’t consensual, “and then they would have to go over which times were consensual and which times weren’t,” Levesque says. “And that’s very traumatizing for the victim.”
That’s one reason that, after learning about underage marriage at a Girl Scout conference she attended in early 2016, when she was 15 years old, Levesque researched New Hampshire laws and began lobbying state legislators to raise the marriage age. She was first elected to the House in 2018.
Meg Chant, program director for the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, agrees that sexual assault is more difficult, but not impossible, to prosecute when a couple are married.
Having underage marriage explicitly cited as a defense in statutory rape cases in the past was problematic, she says, because an adult abuser could avoid criminal charges for sex with a young teenager through marriage.
“That becomes (an) incentive, potentially, for an older man to seek marriage with that child,” Chant says.
At Tuesday’s hearing, that’s what one Army veteran from San Diego said had happened to her: After she ran away from home to escape an active-duty service member who had been grooming and molesting her since she was 14, police returned her to her parents, who 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,” Specialist Brittany Wright told the committee.
Girls, Men and Sex Trafficking
Even after the marriage age was raised to 16, Levesque, who serves on the House Children and Family Law Committee, and others kept fighting to raise it to 18.
Their main argument was and is that, while teens can legally consent to sex at age 16 in New Hampshire, they do not have full legal rights. Laws intended to protect minors mostly bar them from working full time, opening a bank account, hiring a lawyer or renting an apartment.
That power difference between a minor and an adult lends itself to controlling and abusive relationships and makes it difficult for the younger spouse to leave – even if they have the emotional maturity to understand that the relationship is abusive in the first place, Levesque and Chant say.
The United Nations considers child marriage a violation of human rights. Girls make up the great majority of victims, and in the United States, there’s often a significant age gap between them and their male partners.
According to Unchained at Last, a nonprofit that campaigns to end underage marriage, 78 percent of all such marriages in the U.S. from 2000 to 2018 involved a girl under 18 and an adult man. Nine percent involved a minor boy and an adult woman, 12 percent were between two minors and fewer than 1 percent were same-sex unions.
In New Hampshire, a married minor is considered emancipated and has some legal rights, including the right to stay at an emergency or domestic violence shelter without the involvement of child protective services (the Division for Children, Youth and Families), Chant says.
Yet often, minors don’t realize that they can seek help, she says. That imbalance in resources, knowledge and legal rights between adult and minor spouses can make the younger partner feel trapped even when they realize that their spouse is abusive – which many of them don’t, she says.
“We see that in adult partners as well, so that’s not unique to these childhood relationships,” Chant says. “But minors are not developmentally prepared to acknowledge an abusive relationship or know how to get themselves out of it.”
Underage marriage also makes it easier for bad actors, including human traffickers, to control their victims and take them across state lines or even out of the country, Levesque says.
“Marriage is used to cover up rape, especially with child rape and human trafficking,” Levesque says. “Sometimes human traffickers will marry the girls and then put them into prostitution. Sometimes it’s their parents or guardians having them marry a family friend or distant relative (abroad) just to get them into the (United States). It’s another form of human trafficking.”
Levesque believes that news coverage of human trafficking cases, including a sex trafficking ring run by a Concord couple that operated in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, helped to sway lawmaker sentiment on underage marriage.
More commonly, child marriages occur when underage teens, especially pregnant girls, are pressured by their parents or guardians to marry for religious or cultural reasons or because of the social stigma against unwed mothers, she says.
In one New Hampshire case, Levesque says, a 13- or 14-year-old girl who got pregnant was urged by her parents, because of their religious beliefs, to marry her older boyfriend. A judge approved the union.
The husband soon became “very abusive, very controlling,” Levesque says. The girl was able to escape and get a divorce with her parents’ support, but many underage girls are not so fortunate, she says.
“What normally happens is they go back to their parents, who send them back to the marriage,” she says.
Divorce rates are much higher among people who marry in their teens – 38 percent divorce within five years – than for couples who are 25 or older when they wed, only 14 percent of whom split within five years, according to academic research based on the National Survey of Family Growth.
Fraidy Reiss, founder of Unchained at Last, said at Tuesday’s hearing that the divorce rate is even higher when one or both partners are minors, with 70 to 80 percent of such marriages ending in divorce.
Supporters Cite Beliefs, Success Stories
Just as opponents of underage marriage cite horror stories about human trafficking and sexual and domestic violence, supporters cite the potential benefits of underage marriage. Bean testified that he and his wife married at 16 and they’ve stayed married for nearly 54 years.
Drye, the chief sponsor of HB 433, believes that there’s “a big disconnect” between the age of consent for sex – 16 – and the age of consent for marriage. In an interview, she cited the experiences of people she knew, including family and friends.
“One of their kids celebrated getting engaged by getting pregnant, and the timeline was always going to be marriage, children, family,” she says of her friends. Getting married gave the young couple “time to be a family before the baby arrived.”
Just as military service members and emancipated minors are exempt from some of the legal limitations on teens under 18, Drye thinks there should be an exception for marriage, too.
That’s because marriage allows the nonmilitary spouse to access important benefits, including health care, some survivors’ benefits and the right to live in military housing or accompany a spouse overseas, Drye says. (Other benefits, including a $100,000 “death gratuity,” can go to anyone named by the service member.)
“I’m the mother of two Marines, so I know a little bit about sending sons off to war,” she says.
She also believes her bill’s requirement that a 17-year-old get parental permission to marry will protect the minor in most cases.
And while she expects that few state residents would take advantage of the exception at first, it could become important to more people if the U.S. goes to war and the draft is reinstated, she says.
“I just like the idea that there are exceptions,” Drye says. “Life always throws you curve balls. This was one of the exceptions that has a real benefit to it.”
If you or someone you know is a victim of sexual or domestic violence, you can call the 24/7 statewide help line run by the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence to speak with a confidential advocate: 1-866-644-3574.
