'I was a kid, then a wife': Married at 15, she's now fighting to end child marriage in US

On June 30, California's Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill that proposed to solidify a minimum age of 18 for marriage, a crucial step towards banning child marriage in the state.

For a long time, the United States has been positioning itself as a global moral police, at times trying to school the Global South in particular, painting itself as a liberal powerhouse. While it questions the human rights abuses around the world, it has completely neglected a social evil that has been scarring its national fabric for quite a long.

For centuries, child marriage has continued to affect the lives of countless children, especially young girls. According to Unicef, nearly one in five girls in the world is still married off before their 18th birthday. What is more intriguing is the fact that the social evil continues to remain prevalent in the United States.

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While America is celebrating 250 years of independence, only 17 out of 50 states have officially banned child marriage as of now. The figure looks worse if one goes back in time. Until the year 2017, child marriage was legal across the US under certain conditions: If the parents or a judge consented, or if the minor was pregnant or had a child.

In the "Child Brides of America series", Firstpost attempted to share the stories of child marriage survivors and did a deep dive on why it is hard for the US to impose a federal ban on child marriage. In this part of the series, we learn about the life of Sara Tasneem, who is a child marriage survivor and has been working tirelessly for the past nine years to ensure the practice is banned across the United States.

Born in Colorado, Sara grew up in a fractured home, bouncing between her divorced parents and their different outlooks towards religion. While her mother practised Islam with a moderate outlook towards life, Sara's father was deeply influenced by a Sufi cult, so much so that he ended up forcing her into marriage at age 15.

In a thought-provoking conversation with Firstpost, Sara shared her journey from a child bride to a survivor and then an advocate, who has been working for the past 9 years to ensure the practice is banned across the US.

Raised in a fractured family & a cult

Sara's parents separated when she was little. Her father was part of a cult that believed in mystic Sufi ideologies, but was known to be a radical conservative. While her mother left the cult and practised moderate Islam, her father was close to the leadership.

"In this group that had very strict gender roles, and so a lot of my youth I spent growing up with those ideas," she said while talking about the cult. "Women and girls were supposed to obey the men in their life, especially their dads. And later on, when we got more like close to the leader of the group, that kind of added another layer of control," she recalled

When she was eight years old, she started living with her grandparents in Fort Collins, Colorado, and her dad moved to California; she described it as one of the brightest parts of her life. "I got to go to school and just do kind of like regular normal things. They were also Muslim, but they weren't a part of the cult that he was in. So it was more of a moderate practise of Islam, and it wasn't like a huge factor in my life," she told Firstpost.

Young Sara Tasneem. Image Source: Instagram - @Tasneem.sf

Sara had several siblings from her father's multiple marriages. Among them, she had four sisters, and sadly, three of them met similar fates. "All of the girls in the group that I grew up with were groomed from young ages to be wives and mothers, even though like that wasn't explicitly told to us," she said.

"Cooking and cleaning and domestic work were like more important to us than school and not thinking about having a career. On the men's side, they were told that marriage was just half of their faith," she said.

Sara recalled that she wanted to play sports when she was young, but she couldn't because that would have required her to wear shorts, when she was supposed to remain covered. " I just remember there were a lot of things that I wanted to do that my brothers could do and I couldn't. And it was always like really frustrating for me as a girl. Sometimes I resented being a girl. I wish that I had been born a boy at times. And that was like really living with my dad," she said.

However, things were different on her mom's side. Sara's mother was born in Guyana and had a more moderate view of religion. Sara recalled that her mother enjoyed her life after she was divorced. "So whenever we visited her, we had much more freedom of thought. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see her that often growing up," she said.

'At 12 my dad tried to marry me off'

Sara told Firstpost that she was just 12 when her father first attempted to marry her off. She said that she was considered a "problem child" in her family. "Like they thought that I was interested in boys, even though I really wasn't. I was only 12 years old. I just feel like I was never included in the decisions about my life," she said.

Her dad took her to England to attend an event of the cult. There, she remembered meeting a man who didn't speak fluent English. He spoke French, and he was much older than Sara. "I wouldn't even talk to a guy. And the guy kept saying, 'I don't understand her'. She doesn't speak my language. I don't know what they were really talking about, to be quite honest. But when I look back on it now, I realise that that was the first time that he tried to marry me off," she recalled.

After that trip, she was sent to live with her mom in Denver. "I guess from my dad's perspective, it was meant to be a punishment. Like he thought that sending me to live with my mom was a punishment, but I was really happy to be reunited with her," she said.

A pleasant life with mom before an unpleasant move

Sara started going to junior high school while she was living with her mother. She mentioned that during her Freshman year, she had a boyfriend, whom she used to meet after basketball practices. However, he mother eventually found out about the boy and told her dad that she was thinking of putting her on birth control.

Her dad eventually asked her mom to send her and her brothers to California for the summers. "I was not excited to see him," she recalled. Sara had to let go of her plans to join junior training camp for kids to join the armed forces and went back to her father.

"Pretty much as soon as I got off the aeroplane, my dad sat me down and told me that I was committing a sin by having a boyfriend. The leader of his group was going to be in Los Angeles that summer, and he was going to pick my husband because I had committed a sin of having a boyfriend. Just to be clear, I was still a virgin at that point. I was still scared to do anything that would send me to hell," she said.

She was 15 at that time, just out of Freshman year. In July that year, her father took her to a religious conference in Los Angeles, and there she met her soon-to-be husband. "I thought it was weird because he was 28 years old at that time. And I was a 15-year-old kid, and I looked like a very skinny 12-year-old," she recalled.

"I remember sitting across from him and him just saying that he didn't want to wait for a long engagement. And I didn't really know what he was talking about. I was told that I was going to marry him that night. And I was given a green velvet dress by one of my aunts. My dad's family was there," she said.

Sara got emotional recalling the turn of events. She couldn't call her mom and was in constant fear of where "she was going to sleep at night". Her nikah took place in a presidential suite of a hotel. "After that, I was basically handed over to this person whom I just met that morning," she averred.

The marriage, the scar

Sara told Firstpost that she was raped on the wedding night. "My life changed forever. In one moment, I was a child, and the next moment, I don't know who I was. I was traumatised, and the only thing that I remember is that I wanted to make my dad proud of me, and I wanted to be a good follower and not be a bad kid," she said.

Sara maintained that she was not allowed to call her mom until and after the traumatic event. When she was told to call her mother, she had her abuser standing over her and forcing her to tell her mother that she did not want to return home.

Somehow, her abuser was able to leave the country with her, where people spoke French (Sara didn't want to disclose the name of the country she was taken to). She felt isolated and didn't speak the language. "I was basically his property... I knew, I just had to be the best wife that I possibly could. And that's what I did to survive. You know, I became pregnant almost immediately," she said.

Sara was forced to marry when she was 15. Image: Instagram - @Tasneem.sf

Six months later, they returned to the United States and got legally married on her 16th birthday. "They got a drive-through wedding chapel marriage certificate, and the clerk signed off on it. Instead of seeing a pregnant girl who needed help, they rubber-stamped my marriage certificate, unfortunately," she said.

This put Sara in a legal trap. She could no longer seek help from the Child Protective Services (CPS) because in California and in some other US states, once you are married, parents' responsibilities towards you as a child, financial and otherwise, end. She couldn't seek other legal recourse, since she was still a minor.

"My mom could no longer file statutory rape charges against my abuser. If I wanted to leave, I could no longer leave," she said. Hence, she had to bear the abuse till she was an adult. During her marriage, she had two children and her priority through it all was to remain "healthy for them".

The road to freedom

The birth of her first child changed Sara's life. She soon started to challenge some of the things that her cult was telling her. She was made fun of by the cult's leadership because she wanted to go back to school. She eventually decided not to pay heed to them. "That was the first time that I really kind of challenged the authority in my life. And I figured out how to get enrolled at an adult school where I was living. I started working towards getting my GED [General Educational Development test]," she told Firstpost.

After she got her GED, Sara decided to pursue computer programming in San Francisco. However, her academic pursuit had to be halted due to her pregnancy. She was carrying her second child.

"I found out I was pregnant; it just felt like my world was just like caving in. And my ex was very controlling. He controlled all the finances and was constantly questioning me whenever I would get home about where I had been, asking me to show receipts of everything that I had. It just, it always felt like I had to constantly defend myself, and he would get really angry and start screaming and yelling at me," she recalled.

16-year-old Sara with her daughter. Image Courtesy: Sara Tasneem

Sara eventually reconnected with her mother and was encouraged by her to continue school. Eventually, she attended culinary school for 2 years and got a job immediately after graduating. At 23, Sara told her husband that she wanted a divorce.

"He basically took the kids initially and told me that he was going to bring them back after the summer, but after the summer he tried to keep my kids, and so I had to fly to where he was living at the time and get my kids back," she said. "And then I filed for divorce, and he tried to assault me and throw me out of a moving vehicle."

"It would take me three years to finalise my divorce because he had the money to hire an attorney. He came from a family that had money, and my dad shunned me and told me that I was a horrible person. I divorced, and the rest of the community shunned me. So I just had to start from nothing," she said, adding that she was homeless for six months.

Child bride turns campaigner

With the support of her mother and other family members, Sara managed to get back on her feet. However, it took her almost 10 years to realise that whatever had happened was "not her fault". In 2014, after her mother's passing, Sara started therapy, where she understood the gravity of her situation.

She recalled that when she went back to school for a bachelor's degree, she researched child marriage as part of her English assignment. "I was like horrified to find out that at that time in all 50 states, child marriage was legally allowed, with the loopholes that were written into each of the states' laws," she said.

Just like Sara, countless activists are working trielessly to ensure that child marriage is banned across all states in the United States. Image Courtesy: Sara Tasneem

"So most states set the marriage age to 18, but there are loopholes that generally allow minors to marry, and that can vary state to state. But in California, most horrifically, there's no age floor to marry with parental consent and judicial review."

After doing research, she eventually connected to non-profits and submitted her story. For the past nine years, Sara has been narrating her traumatic life story to lawmakers and media with the hopes that the evil of child marriage is banned in her country.

But challenges galore

This was not the first time Californian lawmakers addressed the issue of child marriage. In 2017, Senator Jerry Hill introduced a bill in California that would set the age limit to 18 without exception. At that time, Sara was working with Unchained At Last and testified in Sacramento to support the bill.

However, the bill was challenged by Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) at that time, leading the bill to meet a dead end. Sara said that at that time both bodies argued that the bill could impact minors' ability to access reproductive rights.

However, since then, Planned Parenthood has retracted its opposition. Over the years, activists pushing for child marriage to be banned in different states of America have faced challenges in both "Red and Blue states". When asked why it is hard to impose a federal ban on child marriage.

Sara noted that laws surrounding marriage are part of the state list; hence, they will have to knock on the doors of state legislatures. With the California Senate Judiciary Committee passing AB 1267, the state of California is one step closer to putting an end to child marriage.

"I've testified in almost every single state that has ended child marriage because of my experience and also because many of the girls who I grew up with were also groomed and forced into marriages as teenagers to grown adult men. They were abused within those marriages. And even my own sisters, each one of them has their own horror story," she said.

"It's just unimaginable how much trauma and pain has come from just one community. And then if you think about that times a thousand, that will get you to the number of children who are being exposed to this horror. And that's why I continue to advocate and share my story, because truly, I don't want another child to have to go through this," Sara told Firstpost.

The passing of the legislation by the state judiciary committee in California is a big win for all the activists who have been working tirelessly to get rid of the social evil, in a country which has been touted as "flag bearer of an open, free and liberal society." It's a crucial step towards more states following the same suit.