For years, the United States has campaigned against child marriage around the world, from Guatemala to Zimbabwe. But we should listen to ourselves: Forty-five states here in America continue to allow girls and boys under 18 to wed.

Girls as young as 10 are occasionally married quite legally in the United States. Nine states have established no absolute minimum age for marriage.

A study this year found that nearly 300,000 children — meaning age 17 and under — were married in the United States from 2000 to 2018. An overwhelming majority were 16- or 17- year-old girls, on average marrying a man four years older. But more than 1,000 were 14 or younger, and five were only 10 years old. Some were wed to people far older.

“No one asked me for consent,” remembered Patricia Abatemarco, who as an eighth grader was married just after her 14th birthday to a man who was 27. “There was nothing romantic about it. I wasn’t in love with him. I didn’t have a crush on him. I was afraid of him.”

A judge in Florence, Ala., married the couple in the courthouse, and then the couple went to the park outside — where the new bride spotted a playground and left the groom to play on the jungle gym.

Abatemarco, now 55, said the path to this marriage began when she was 12 and living in a middle-class home. Her parents were secular, but she had become quite religious and during a personal crisis sought help from an evangelical Christian telephone hotline. A counselor, Mark, showed up and offered free counseling services; these became increasingly intense, she said, and he began to forcibly rape her repeatedly.

At 13, she became pregnant by these rapes. She didn’t know what to do, but Mark and her mother favored marriage. This solved their problems: For Abatemarco’s mother, it averted the stigma of an out-of-wedlock baby in the house, and for Mark, it allowed him to dodge rape charges. Abatemarco desperately wanted to keep the baby, in hopes of having someone to love and comfort her, and her mom told her this was the only way she could do so.

While this happened decades ago, similar reasoning leads to many youthful marriages today.

I’ve been writing about child marriages in the United States since 2017, when I came across the case of an 11-year-old girl, Sherry Johnson, who had been forced to marry her rapist in Florida. Child marriage was then allowed in some form in all 50 states.

Now, thanks in part to heroic work by an advocacy organization, Unchained at Last, five states have completely barred marriages by people under 18: Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and (just this month) Rhode Island. New York has passed a similar bill that is awaiting the governor’s signature.

The states that allow child marriages mostly do so in particular circumstances, such as with the permission of a parent and a judge. These safeguards don’t work very well. The marriages sometimes involve a girl, perhaps pregnant, marrying an older man who may be her rapist.

The new study found that 60,000 of the child marriages since 2000 involved couples with a large enough gap in ages that sex would typically be a crime. “The marriage license became a get-out-of-jail-free card in most of those states,” said Fraidy Reiss, a victim of forced marriage who founded Unchained at Last.

There are, of course, 17-year-olds who fall deeply in love and can handle a marriage. We can understand that if a girl becomes pregnant, the couple may prefer to marry right away. But it’s complicated: The legal system withholds many rights from people under 18, so a married 17-year-old can become trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare.

If the marriage sours, an underage girl will often not be accepted at a women’s shelter. She will have difficulty retaining a lawyer to get assistance. Astonishingly, she may even have trouble getting divorced, because children often cannot initiate a legal proceeding without going through a guardian. And if a minor flees a violent husband, the police may send her right back to her abuser.

That’s what happened to Abatemarco.

Her marriage at 14 didn’t work. Within months, Abatemarco said, Mark began beating her almost daily and sometimes the new baby as well. (Mark died in 2008, so I don’t know his version of events.)

One night, she said, she fled a beating and was walking on the road about midnight with her baby in a stroller. A police officer stopped her for violating curfew, drove her and the baby back home, gave a copy of the written warning to her husband and then drove off.

“My husband then beat me,” Abatemarco said.

Eventually, Abatemarco fled for good and put her baby daughter up for adoption. With the help of her parents, she was able to get a divorce — on a school day, with enough time to catch her 11th-grade English class.

The United States is quite right to campaign to end child marriage in Bangladesh and Yemen. Let’s do the same at home.

Moringa and turmeric aren’t well-known crops in Israel. But when the ones being cultivated at Kibbutz Shluchot in the north of the country reach the market, you can rest assured that they grew in the most supportive and caring atmosphere.

For the past nine months, they’ve been grown by adults with special needs as part of their work at an NGO called Shai Asher that provides them with a meaningful employment experience, constituting a stepping stone toward a more independent and integrated life.

In Israel, people with special needs go to school until the age of 21, after which those who can begin working. The problem is that many graduates don’t find employment or struggle in inappropriate jobs.

“In Israel, 75 percent of people with special needs are unemployed, and then you have to look into what kind of employment the other 25 percent has,” explains Menachem Stolpner, founder and director of Shai Asher.

Born in the United States, social worker Stolpnerimmigrated to Israel with his family in 1996, settling in Shluchot, a member of the religious kibbutz movement.

“My motto is to try and find meaningful work experience for people with special needs,” he says. “I decided to create a therapeutic work environment. It’s a job; they get paid. They come in every day to a therapeutic setting that is a balance between teaching and having them become more independent but knowing there’s a safety net,” he explains.

There are currently eight people gardening at Shai Asher, some of whom have mental illness, some who are on the autism spectrum and others classified with developmental disabilities. The NGO has amassed around 60 alumni, some of whom have continued on to find employment elsewhere.

“The goal is that they can say to me,‘Menachem, I’m ready and I want a job outside,” Stolpner explains. “I try to help them help themselves become workers who, when they go for a job, the employer will say ‘Hey, this is a guy who can work.’”

All the little things

Stolpner works with the program’s participants on group interaction, following instructions, positive relations, coming in on time and making sure they get enough sleep the night before work.

“All those little things that you take for granted they have to learn, to be shown, take into themselves,” he says.

The NGO was founded eight years ago in memory of Stolpner’sfriend Milton (Asher) Marks III. It started out with a therapeutic petting zoo on the kibbutz before switching over to gardening.

The turmeric and moringa are new additions.

“We have a plant nursery and a building that we’ve created attached to it so we work inside, and we also have a vegetable garden,” Stolpner says. “Over the past year or so we started to concentrate on specific plants to grow in the hope that those things will be marketable.”

Turmeric and moringa, he says, were chosen for several reasons.

“They were things that we could learn about their growth because it takes a long time to grow and a process. In addition to that, they’re very healthful.And they’re not that commonly known here in Israel; people don’t know the uses and benefits,” he notes.

Turmeric, the better-known of the two, is a plant whose rootstalk can be used either fresh or boiled in water, dried and ground into a yellow powder. Aside from being the base for curries, turmeric is also used in traditional medicine for its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

Moringa is a plant whose leaves and seed pods are used in traditional medicine for their anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and anti-fungal properties. It is also consumed in powder form.

Except for the first lockdown last spring, Stolpner and his fellow gardeners have been hard at work throughout the coronavirus crisis. This is possible because the work is done outside, in line with regulations.

Stolpneris even looking ahead. He was joined this year by a full-time volunteer, a local retiree, but otherwise remains the NGO’s sole employee.

“Oh, we have a lot of future plans,” he says.

“There are a number of things that we need in order to work more efficiently and better,” he adds. “We’re building a deck as a first step and putting up a pergola.”

As for Shai Asher’s exotic new crops, now is only the beginning.

“We’re just starting out; the turmeric won’t be ready for another month for harvest,” Stolpner says. “In the meantime, we’re growing and harvesting and processing and God willing we’ll be able to market.”

Courtney Smith is leading a life of service, helping youth who are experiencing homelessness in Detroit with her nonprofit organization, the Detroit Phoenix Center. She is the founder and CEO of the center which opened in 2017 and is the youngest CEO of a homeless youth service provider in the city and the only woman of color.

Smith, 29, knows what it’s like to experience homelessness at a young age. A Detroit native, she was in the foster care system as a baby until she was adopted at three years old. Throughout the years, family conflict and challenges arose at home, forcing her to go into a shelter for teens at the age of 15.

From then through her early 20’s, she was in and out of different shelters and staying with family members and friends. As an undergraduate honor student at Eastern Michigan University who nevertheless continued to struggle with homelessness, Smith realized that it was a systemic issue that needed to be addressed.

According to Michigan League for Public Policy, “One in 30 unaccompanied youth ages 12-17 will experience homelessness in a given year. This number jumps to one in 10 from age 18-24. Youth who are in or aging out of foster care, involved in the juvenile justice system, identify as LGBTQ, or are Black or part of the Latinx community are also more likely to experience one or more instances of homelessness between the ages of 12 and 24.”

Courtesy of Courtney Smith

From 2013-2016, Smith worked at the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth as the Michigan youth task force coordinator, responsible for bringing service providers and youth together to find solutions to end homelessness in their communities. Smith left Detroit in 2015 (still working remotely for NAEHCY) and headed to Kentucky to do a year at AmeriCorps, where she worked at a community center serving immigrants and refugees.

In 2016, Smith returned to her hometown to help her family and youngest brother, Blair. While trying to help Blair and his friends secure housing and resources, she asked herself, ‘Where do people like my brother, who may not identify themselves as someone who is experiencing homelessness, go?’

That same year, she submitted a proposal to join the Millennial Trains Project to help find solutions to the issue of youth experiencing homelessness. The organization provided Smith and 25 social service entrepreneurs training, resources, and the opportunity to travel to six different communities and learn from CEOs of non-profit organizations. Smith was one of the five social service entrepreneurs who received a $10K grant.

During the trip, she met a 16-year-old girl who shared her experiences and told Smith how helpful drop-in centers were. She loved the idea.

“She said the best way that you can thank me is to go back to your own community and do something,” Smith said in an interview with theGrio.“This 16-year-old-girl really challenged me to put my money where my mouth was, and I didn’t have [any] money, so I was really moved by that.”

She continues, “It just so happened that I got on the train in the year that the last stop, for the first time that they’ve ever done this, the train was actually going to be in my city. So I convened a group of youth in Detroit and a group of stakeholders, and I talked to them about this model of a drop-in center and we built out what is known today as the Detroit Phoenix Center.”

Courtesy of Courtney Smith

Detroit Phoenix Center opened in January 2017. It is a low barrier resource center where young people can drop in off the street. They can shower, wash clothes, get emergency assistance, food, and access to mental health resources. If they need housing that night, the organization connects them with housing. They also have an after-school enrichment program along with life skills and educational courses.

“So we don’t just focus on basic needs,” Smith explains.”We also focus on career readiness, life skills, educational workshops. We also have a youth action board. The Youth Action Board is comprised of a group of youth who were with us when we first started to make sure that our work is youth-centric.”

Young people serviced by the program can apply for a 12-month fellowship to learn about nonprofit leadership, nonprofit management, and advocacy.

“We believe that those who are closest to the problem need to be the ones driving the solutions,” Smith says. “So we want to empower the youth that we serve to be change agents in the community and also to hold us accountable as an agency to make sure that we don’t get too far removed from the heart of the matter. “

Like many organizations and businesses impacted by COVID-19, Detroit Phoenix Center has had to make some changes. The building the center was leasing closed so they’ve transitioned to virtual and mobile services. Throughout the pandemic, the center’s youth fellows have remained involved by helping register voters and providing legwork for supply giveaways and more.

“We had to go out and literally find the youth,” Smith shares. “We had to go to hotels. We had to go to the abandoned houses. We had to go to the last known address and thankfully, we haven’t lost any of our young people, but it definitely changed the scope of what we do.”

Smith and her team have delivered care packages, clothing, paid security deposits and outstanding rent and provided hotel vouchers for emergency housing.

“We did mental health workshops,” continues Smith.”We paid cell phone bills. We delivered laptop computers and routers. We literally provided wraparound support during this time. We’ve been able to serve more youth in the community because, again, transportation was a barrier. But since we have literally been taking our services to the young people, they’ve been reaching out through word of mouth.”

On Nov, 30, the Detroit Phoenix Center is launching a social media challenge for their December fundraising campaign One Night Without a Bed.

“It’s a call-to-action,” says Smith. “We want people to give up their bed for one night in December for the 4.2 million young people who experience homelessness on any given night. ‘We’re kicking it off on Nov. 30th, which is the last day of National Homeless Youth Awareness Month.”

Though youth homelessness is often talked about as a separate issue, Smith believes you can’t talk about youth homelessness without talking about poverty, educational disparities, and health outcomes.

“We have to really look at youth homelessness in relation to other systems…like the juvenile justice system,” she explains. “And the only way that we can truly, truly break the cycle of youth homelessness in our community is if all those systems work together to really move the needle. And also, to really, truly elevate the voices in the lived experiences of young people in the community and those who have actually experienced homelessness and center their voices and center their experiences in our solutions.”

Smith shared her advice to those who are interested in creating more Black-owned nonprofit organizations that are helping young people in need. “I would definitely tell them that we are uniquely positioned to really create the change in the community that we want.”

“No one is more qualified than we are,” Smith continues. “And you deserve to be at the table. And if you don’t have a seat at the table, then you need to open up a window to build your own table. Do what you need to do to bring your passion to fruition. One thing that I always remember, even in moments where I’m doubting myself, is that someone else’s life…someone else’s freedom, someone else’s joy is attached to my purpose, and that is a big calling, that is a deep calling.”

On the opening day of the Detroit Phoenix Center, Smith learned her youngest brother, Blair Smith, transitioned by suicide at the age of 19. Her brother’s life and his legacy are embedded in the very mission of the Detroit Phoenix Center and she has started a scholarship fund in his honor.