Fifteen-year-olds can’t get a driver’s license or vote in elections, but they can get married in Hawaiʻi – one of a shrinking number of states that allows underage marriage.
A bill that would’ve outlawed the practice, raising the legal age of marriage to 18 without exceptions, passed the Hawaiʻi House of Representatives this year but failed to gain traction in the Senate.
It’s the seventh year in a row Hawaiʻi lawmakers have considered a child marriage ban without passing legislation despite a push by national advocacy groups to end the practice. Under Hawaiʻi law, 16- and 17-year-olds can get married with parental permission, and youth as young as 15 can marry with a judge’s approval.
“It’s a shame, first and foremost for the children of Hawaiʻi who remain in danger of child marriage and all the harm that comes along with it,” said Alex Goyette, public policy manager for the Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy group for women and girls.
The bill’s main obstacle in the Legislature is Sen. Joy San Buenaventura, who chairs the health and human services committee and declined to give the measure a hearing.
In a statement, the senator said marriage can provide benefits to youth who are trying to escape an abusive family situation, are pregnant or want to get on their partner’s health insurance.
“I am always leery of national advocacy groups who just want to notch Hawaiʻi as a win without taking into account the culture and circumstances here,” San Buenaventura said.
More than 800 minors got married in Hawaiʻi between 2000 and 2022, according to Hawaiʻi Department of Health data analyzed by the advocacy organization Unchained At Last. The vast majority – 686 of them – were girls marrying adult men.
Most of the child brides were 16 or 17, but seven of them were as young as 15. On average, Hawaiʻi youth married adults between three and five years older than them, according to Unchained At Last’s data analysis.
In written testimony, the health department characterized most of the state’s underage marriages as “teens marrying teens.” However, the law puts no limits on the age of an adult spouse and there were outliers in which teens married adults 10 to 21 years their senior, the health department testified.
Child marriage in Hawaiʻi is rare, and getting rarer. From 2005 to 2014, there were 329 underage marriages involving residents, and from 2015 through 2024, there were 90, the health department told Civil Beat.
In one 10-year sample of 230,000 marriages in which both partners claimed Hawaiʻi residency, the health department identified only 216 – 153 brides and 63 grooms – who were minors. At a rate of 0.09%, Hawaiʻi isn’t one of the states where these marriages are most common.
Still, national groups are seeking to end child marriage entirely. They argue the arrangements can trap youth in relationships that may be exploitative and difficult, legally and practically, for them to escape.
“Even if 49 other states ban child marriage,” Goyette said, “all American kids are still vulnerable as long as a predator can buy a plane ticket to Hawaiʻi.”
A Bride At 15
For Iris Lorenzo, getting married at 15 meant she had to grow up fast.
The ʻAiea resident was a sophomore at Kamehameha Schools in 1975 when she met the man who would become her husband, Edward “Bully” Lorenzo. He was 21.
Bully proposed just a few months after the couple connected at a local car show.
“He just felt it was right,” she said, “that I was the right one.”
Iris said she was scared but said yes at the urging of her mother, who was in poor health and worried her only child would be orphaned. Iris’ parents were both older, she said, and her father had health issues.
“She was kind of like, trying to have me grow up, but also have somebody who would take care of me and be there for me,” Lorenzo told Civil Beat. “Mom said, ‘This would be good for you.’”
Being a married high schooler was tough, Lorenzo said. She almost immediately got pregnant and had her first son, which made preparing for her final exams a major challenge.
“I’m like, ‘Baby, please, go to sleep, so Mommy can study,’” she recalled. “It was difficult. I’m not going to lie.”
At 16, she had another baby. At 17, another. In between the second and third, somehow, Lorenzo was able to graduate from Kamehameha. But by then, she was socially isolated. All her friends abandoned her after she got married, she said, so her husband was the only person she could confide in.
“That is the one thing that hurt me,” she said.
The couple ultimately had five children, a dozen grandkids and a long and happy marriage, Iris said. This June would’ve marked their 50th wedding anniversary, but Bully unexpectedly passed away in November.
“My husband and I lived 50 wonderful years together,” she said. “We had struggles, but we worked through it. And not once did we talk about divorce.”
Looking back though, Iris, now 65, said she wouldn’t necessarily recommend her path to today’s youth.
If it were up to her, people would wait until at least 21 to get married, she said. At that point, she said, they’ve finished high school and are better equipped to decide what they want in life.
“I would tell parents you have to let your kid experience everything a child and student needs to experience before they’re pressured into making a decision to either get married or start their career,” she said.
“Nowadays, kids, they’re not ready for being adults. At all. I was basically ready to be an adult when I was 15. But I look at my grandkids. No, they’re not ready. Experience being a kid.”
Marriage Puts Kids At Risk, Advocates Say
Ten years ago, child marriage was legal in all 50 states. In 2015, Unchained At Last began spotlighting the issue, and in the years since has organized female protesters wearing wedding dresses and chains in front of statehouses.
The group points to a 2016 U.S. Department of State report that calls child and forced marriage a human rights abuse and to research showing a correlation between early marriage and lost educational attainment and income potential.
Since 2018, 13 states and Washington, D.C. have moved to ban marriages involving minors. Two other states – Maine and Missouri –have passed child marriage bans this year that are awaiting signatures from their governors.
“It costs nothing,” said Fraidy Reiss, the founder of Unchained At Last and herself a forced-marriage survivor. “It harms no one. But it ends a human rights abuse.”
Children can be forced into marriage by parents or guardians who want to rid themselves of financial responsibility, Reiss said.
“In most of these cases,” she said, “no one is even asking the kid ‘Do you want to marry?’ let alone ‘Why do you want to get married?’”
Parents also sometimes want to prevent their daughters from having premarital sex, Goyette said.
“So in their head, if the child is starting to engage in these behaviors, then what they think the right thing to do for them is to get married,” he said.
Hawaiʻi’s acceptance of marriages for 15-year-olds can also conflict with the state’s statutory rape law, Reiss noted. The state’s age of consent is 16, although there is a “close in age” exception for individuals within five years of each other.
Unchained At Last’s data analysis, spanning 2000 to 2022, found at least one instance of a marriage that would violate that provision.
“That marriage certificate is a Get Out of Jail Free card,” Reiss said, “because within marriage, that is no longer considered statutory rape if the perpetrator is no less than five years older.”
In some states, minors’ limited legal rights can cause problems if they want to leave home, Reiss said.
Married youth who flee their spouse could be considered runaways, and those who help them could be charged with custodial interference, which is the crime of taking in a minor without the “right to do so.” Domestic violence shelters often don’t accept unaccompanied youth, Reiss said. And in some places, minors cannot file for divorce on their own. They need an adult representative.
However, these concerns may not apply to Hawaiʻi. In the islands, married minors are considered emancipated individuals with all the rights and responsibilities of an adult, including entering into legal proceedings. And Hawaiʻi passed a law last year that allows island homeless shelters to take in unsheltered youth without necessarily informing their parents or guardians.
Hawaiʻi Lawmaker Blocks Child Marriage Ban
Hawaiʻi’s legislation, House Bill 729, had widespread support in the House of Representatives, with more than two dozen introducers. While it was promoted by national groups, it also had support locally from the Hawaiʻi Commission on the Status of Women and local chapters of Zonta International, a women’s rights organization.
It received almost unanimous testimony in support, with the exception of one person who said marriage is “not a function of the state” but of the church.
It was sent to the Senate in early March and was assigned to the health and human services committee headed by San Buenaventura. That’s where it died.
In an email, San Buenaventura told Civil Beat that marriage has provided a unique opportunity for young people to access needed benefits. Hawaiʻi only passed an emancipation law in 2024, she said, allowing young people to obtain the rights and responsibilities of adulthood.
“Until last year, the only way for a teen to be independent was to get married,” she said.
The senator cited the health department data showing that most cases of underage marriage involve people close in age. From that, San Buenaventura said she’s drawn several conclusions.
“This means that either they want to escape an abusive situation through self-help because we had no emancipation procedure at that time OR more likely, it was a pregnant teen wanting to get married to her boyfriend,” she said.
The young person could just cohabitate with their partner, but that robs them of several benefits, the senator said, including their spouse’s health insurance.
To that, Reiss said: “Medicaid – not marriage.” Having minors enter into an adult sexual relationship to escape an abusive home or get health care is “profoundly dangerous public policy,” she said.
“The idea of telling a kid who’s in an abusive home ‘Well, we’ll get you out, let’s just find you a husband,’” Reiss said, “I mean, I grew up in an abusive home. I was forced to marry as a teen. That didn’t solve the problem. That’s just out of the frying pan, into the fire.”
But San Buenaventura has stood firm. The lawmaker said she’s heard that some medical treatments are not covered by Medicaid but could be paid for through a spouse’s employer-provided health care.
“Why should the Legislature deny a pregnant teen health insurance or relegate her to taxpayer paid health insurance just because a national advocacy group claims that she is better off cohabiting without marital benefits?” the senator said. “Remember, unlike most states, Hawaiʻi has employer-mandated health insurance.”
If the relationship between the teen and their partner dissolves, San Buenaventura said the young person is better protected through marriage than cohabitation alone. The youth would potentially be entitled to spousal support, spousal Social Security, inheritance and property rights.
“All benefits denied her by cohabiting,” San Buenaventura said.
Now that Hawaiʻi has an emancipation law, San Buenaventura said she wants to see how it plays out. For the moment, her view on the child marriage legislation hasn’t changed. The legislative session ended on Friday, but the bill will have another chance next year.
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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
