Do 9,000 minors marry each year in California – or do 15?
A discrepancy in data has contributed to the statehouse stalemate over Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris’s AB2924, a bill which would remove provisions in state law that allow minors to marry.
Unchained at Last, which advocates to end the practice in all 50 states, points to data it compiled from the American Community Survey, an annual report conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau to collect detailed population data.
In 2022, 9,069 minors between the ages of 15 and 17 reported being married in California during the previous year, according to the survey data. Between 2017 and 2021, the number ranged from 7,716 to 8,789.
But the official state data – cited by Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and National Center for Youth Law – has reported between 9 and 15 marriages per year since 2019.
Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and the National Center for Youth Law — who all filed a joint opposition letter against AB 2924 — compared the state data with a separate 2018 study based on data from the American Community Survey between 2010 and 2014, which reported that between 5 and 10 of every 1,000 minors reported they had been or were married.
These organizations read the difference in data as evidence that minors are entering extralegal marriages, such as through spiritual or religious ceremonies, but are not getting legally married.
“The stark discrepancy between these two data sets suggests that a significant number of minors in California consider themselves to be married – even if their legal records do not,” the letter reads.
The state mandates the data collection but does not provide funding, according to Fraidy Reiss, founder and executive director of Unchained at Last.
Senator Aisha Wahab added that there are gaps in the 2018 law, including that marriage certificates involving minors that are not returned with a court order are not currently counted, creating a loophole in the data requirements.
“Almost every county in that first report [for 2019 ] just had no data, no data, no data – they were not complying with this,” Reiss added.
When Reiss asked the California Department of Public Health, which is tasked with compiling this data, about the missing numbers, she did not get an answer, she said.
In 2019, 43 counties reported no data. Since 2020, counties that do not submit data are “presumed to be zero,” according to the annual reports. Between 2020 and 2023, only two counties were marked as having not submitted data and assumed to be zero.
The American Community Survey data is “giving us a very good indication that child marriage is a significant problem in California,” Reiss added.
The lack of clear numbers on child marriage in California stalled a separate bill proposed by Wahab in the Senate that would ban child marriage under 18 with only certain exceptions. Following debate in the Senate Judiciary Committee, the bill has turned into a data collection bill.
“There’s a lot of disparity in regards to really concrete data,” Wahab said. “The Senate Judiciary definitely wants to see that there’s a pervasive problem.”
Her bill, SB 575, would mandate that these marriages are included in the count, and would require the State Registrar to implement a grant program to further study extralegal marriages. The bill has been referred to the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Wahab added that while the data component of the bill is “incredibly important,” she hopes to address the issue of child marriage “if there are just even a handful of kids that are being abused.”
“The reality to me is we’re going to keep chipping away at it,” Wahab added. “This is a step in the right direction, at least to appease some of these stakeholder groups.”