If you don’t think a grown man marrying a 14-year-old child in North Carolina is not a legalized sex trafficking ring, then something is wrong with you.
The laws in North Carolina should change when it comes to 14, when a child can legally wed. How can we save our children like this?
A recent article I read had me thinking and feeling some way because our lawmakers allow this to happen in our state.
Buncombe County register of deeds, Drew Reisinger, said in a local report that one of his duties is to sign off on marriage licenses. He said it sometimes put him in an uncomfortable position.
Consistently we’ve had young girls, more often than not, coming in, with people who are older than they are and there’s something that doesn’t feel right, and it hasn’t felt right for some time now, Reisinger told WFAE.
Did you know that 3,949 marriage license applications involving minors were filed in North Carolina between 2000 and 2019? 93% of those applications were between a CHILD and an adult. DISGUSTING!
Reisinger said that his office partnered with the International Center for Research on Women and found the statistics mentioned above.
To some degree, there’s been an unwillingness from lawmakers to do anything about it, Reisinger said. But now the data is here and we can show North Carolina I think it’s an embarrassing stat that’s going to embarrass lawmakers to do something about.
Reisinger said those seeking marriage with a minor are coming from out of state, and that rate is at 66% in Buncombe County, North Carolina.
Reisinger said he believes these minors are under a lot of pressure when it comes to these marriages, and he believes that sometimes they aren’t consensual.
What we know is sometimes it’s not necessarily consensual. If these girls are still kids and their brain hasn’t fully developed yet, there’s a lot of pressure on them, Reisinger said.
North Carolina is the fourth highest state for incidents of child marriage. Girls as young as 14 in North Carolina can obtain a marriage license under the so-called “pregnancy exception,” and girls age 16 can get married with parental consent.
North Carolina lawmakers should intervene on this legal child sex trafficking ring and raise the marriage age in North Carolina to the adult age, 18.
