Cassie Levesque.Photo: Erin Clark for The Boston Globe via Getty
Cassie Levesqueis only 22 but already the New Hampshire lawmaker has spent years attempting to ban child and teen marriage.
She’s made headway but says the fight is still not over.
At 18, Levesque stood at Gov. Chris Sununu’s side as he signed a law raising New Hampshire’s minimum marriage age to 16 — up from 13 for girls and 14 for boys.
But Levesque says her work continues as she looks to make New Hampshire the first state in the country to raise its minimum marriage age to 18.
“A hundred years ago, women were still getting married young. Now we understand that kids need to be kids,” she toldPoliticoin the article published Sunday. “They need to be able to grow up, because if they’re thrown right into adulthood, they tend to sink versus swim.”
Child marriage remains legal in many states, with nine having no minimum marriage age at all.
Some states have tightened their laws or banned the practice outright in recent years.Politicoreports that six have raised the minimum marriage age to 18 since 2018.
Levesque, who sits on New Hampshire’s Children and Family Law Committee, says she worries about “the 16-year-old marrying the 20-something-plus-year-old who is a family friend from a different country, who’s going to take them, and then they’ll be gone.”
Still, she faces obstacles getting her proposal turned into law. Her committee previously voted down her bill to raise the minimum marriage age to 18.
The issue can be a partisan one, with Republicans seeing such bills as government overreach. One New Hampshire Republicansaid in 2017that he worried about the social ramifications of preventing teen marriage: “If we pass this, we will ensure forever that every child born to a minor will be born out of wedlock.” Other lawmakers said the option should still exist for soldiers.
As she explained toPolitico, Levesque became interested in the laws regarding minors getting married while she was at a Girl Scouts conference in 2015, when she was shocked to learn that girls as young as 13 could be married in New Hampshire.
Eventually, she asked state representatives she’d met through the scouts to sponsor a bill that would raise the minimum marriage age to 18.
In 2018, Levesque worked again with lawmakers on a compromise bill — one that would raise the legal marriage age to 16. It wasn’t what she wanted, but she felt it was better than the laws on the books at the time. It was around that time she decided to run for office herself, tellingPolitico: “The first time that I ever voted was the time that I voted for myself.”
Now in her second term, Levesque tells the outlet she plans to run again and introduce another bill aiming to ban child marriage outright.
This time, she said, she’ll be more vocal about the documented consequences of marrying young, including the high divorce rates and the harm the practice often does to young women and girls.
“A couple of representatives have said, ‘I got married young, and I’m still married to them, and it was a good marriage,’ " she said. “And I said, ‘That’s really great, [but you] are the 20 percent, versus the 80 percent who end up in situations that they wish could’ve been stopped.”
source: people.com
