To your point.
Last year, Ash Pereira called the police in her hometown of Enterprise, Alabama, to report a rape.
The date of the alleged crime was nearly 15 years earlier; the accused, her now ex-husband, Jason Greathouse. Pereira, now 30, was locked in a bitter custody dispute with the man, a former youth pastor who impregnated her when she was 15 and he was 25.
What ensued was shocking to Pereira and many observers: Her ex was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor, did not have to register as a sex offender, and maintains partial custody of their 14-year-old daughter.
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A ‘sickening’ national situation
Pereira’s account may be shocking, but it isn’t unique. In the overwhelming majority of U.S. states, child marriage is still perfectly legal, as long as a parent or judge consents. According to one study, nearly 300,000 minors were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018—most of them underage girls married to men at least four years older.
Once they’re in these marriages, says Freidy Reiss, founder of anti-child-marriage charity Unchained At Last, the girls are stuck in a “nightmarish legal trap.” What would have been considered a crime—sex between a minor girl and an adult man—is now perfectly legal. And their options for leaving are drastically limited.
In most states, Reiss explained, minors who leave home are considered runaways, meaning police can return them to their homes and even arrest them if they don’t comply. Most domestic violence shelters won’t accept victims under the age of 18 for similar reasons. Young people also have a hard time securing lawyers, because contracts with minors are usually considered voidable, and they cannot bring a legal proceeding like a divorce or restraining order in their own name.
“We honestly have set up a system where I can understand why someone would think, ‘The only way out for me is death.’”
— Freidy Reiss
Because of this, Reiss said, she’s seen numerous child brides turn to suicide.
“We honestly have set up a system where I can understand why someone would think, ‘The only way out for me is death,’” she said.
Laws protecting women of all ages who are impregnated by their rapists are not much better. More than a third of states still require a felony conviction in order to terminate the rapist’s right to custody of the child—more than what’s required in cases of child abuse, neglect, molestation, or a myriad of other reasons a judge might terminate parental rights. And that’s a problem because, while an estimated 17,000 to 32,000 rape-related pregnancies occur each year, less than 1 percent of rapes result in a felony conviction.
As a result, stories abound of women who are forced to share custody with their alleged attackers: The Nebraska woman whose assailant won visitation rights despite pleading guilty to third-degree sexual assault; the Pennsylvania woman whose rapist maintained a right to shared custody even from jail; the woman in Detroit who was forced to split custody with the man who abducted and raped her at age 13. (The judge in the latter case eventually reversed his ruling.)
Perhaps most similar to Pereira is the case of Jessica Stallings, another Alabama native who says her mother’s half-brother started having sex with her when she was 13 and he was 20. Stallings says her parents did nothing to stop the abuse and instead forced her to marry her assailant, who eventually impregnated her multiple times. When Stallings finally mustered the courage to leave, the court granted him visitation rights.
Stallings was still fighting for full custody in 2019, when Alabama passed a law requiring courts to terminate the parental rights of convicted rapists. But the law required Stallings to get a felony conviction against her uncle, which she was not able to do—despite twice going to a grand jury with birth certificates, medical records and DNA evidence.
“It’s sickening,” Stallings told The Washington Post. “I’ve spent my entire life scared to death of my rapist, and now, I’m fighting him for custody of my children.”
much more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/ash-pereira-was-a-child-bride-why-does-her-ex-still-share-custody-of-their-child?via=newsletter&source=Weekend
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