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Child Brides Tracked Through Immigration Data

posted by martyb on Sunday January 13 2019, @12:32PM   
from the Hiding-In-Plain-Site dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Privacy advocates have been on about how big data and large datasets can be be used against the population for decades. Now key data released by the immigration department may provide the key to bringing barbaric crimes out into the open. Data released by the Government shows thousands of child brides allowed by immigration. Accounts by some of the victims detail how they were used to gain access to America even though they were underage. While some senators have sworn to close the loopholes used to bring child brides into the US we can only expect more of this type of activity to come to light in the future as the public engages in analysis of data released by governments.

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Original Submission

• Re:Still goes on in this day and age Re:Still goes on in this day and age (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @01:05PM (5 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @01:05PM (#785884)

  They forget the child brides in America, born in America and legally married in America.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_States#Statistics [wikipedia.org]

  U.S.-born white children of U.S.-born parents, are more likely to marry underage than immigrants to the U.S. or the children of immigrants. This was true even in the 1920s at the height of immigration. This shows that child marriage is not a recent phenomenon, and it is not something that has only been introduced by recent immigrants.

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• Re:Still goes on in this day and age (Score: 5, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday January 13 2019, @05:51PM

  by HiThere (866) on Sunday January 13 2019, @05:51PM (#785943) Journal

  If a 16 year old girl marries a 74 year old man, one may well wonder what their relationship actually is. And in a very large percentage of the referenced cases the older of the two parties was under 21. From the link, sometimes well under 21. I can think of a time when I was about 18 when, if we had been caught, I might have been forced into a marriage with a "child". But that's not the way we thought of it.

  --
  Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.

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• Re:Still goes on in this day and age Re:Still goes on in this day and age (Score: 4, Informative) by hemocyanin on Sunday January 13 2019, @07:24PM (1 child)

  by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday January 13 2019, @07:24PM (#785979) Journal

  Your argument seems to come from a different part of the wikipedia page, specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_States#Statistics [wikipedia.org]

  U.S.-born white children of U.S.-born parents, are more likely to marry underage than immigrants to the U.S. or the children of immigrants. This was true even in the 1920s at the height of immigration.[42] This shows that child marriage is not a recent phenomenon, and it is not something that has only been introduced by recent immigrants.

  Footnote 42 leads to here: https://theconversation.com/child-marriage-is-still-legal-in-the-us-88846 [theconversation.com] (The sentence after FN42 is obviously opinion and gives insight into bias) which contains the following:

  Many assume that it was a practice brought to the United States by immigrant populations, or one used in isolationist religious sects. Neither belief is borne out by the numbers.

  That quote contains a link to here: https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469629537/american-child-bride/ [uncpress.org] which is a blurb for a book stating:

  current estimates indicate that 9 percent of living American women were married before turning eighteen.

  So, even if we were to take that 9% figure at face value (the links end at that blurb and the blurb contains no information on how that figure was obtained), we need to take into account the fact that 9% of all living women in America includes many who were born into an entirely different social climate than exists currently. For example, see this section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_States#Statistics [wikipedia.org]

  In Alabama there was over 8,600 child marriages from 2000 to 2015, the fourth highest amount of any state. However, child marriage in Alabama showed a large decline in that time. In 2000, almost 1,200 children married, but by 2014 it dropped to 190

  Using "all living women" to prove a point about girls living today seems rather deceptive because the amount of change that occurred between the 50s and 2000 was seismic, and even in a mere 14 years following 2000, the numbers dropped to a sixth of the 2000 level in Alabama. Clearly, today is not last century.

  Secondly, that 9% figure includes girls "under 18". I don't feel the same way about a girl who is 17 years and 10 months old getting married compared to one who is 14. For the 17yo, I think "idiot, but whatever, it's your life" -- for the 14yo, "gross, disgusting, manipulated and abused, that's wrong". So not only is that statistic covering women born into a different world ages ago, it is including extra people, people close enough to 18 that it barely matters.

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  • Re:Still goes on in this day and age (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday January 14 2019, @10:56AM

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Monday January 14 2019, @10:56AM (#786402) Homepage Journal

    This probably needs to be mentioned somewhere in the comments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_Europe [wikipedia.org]

    "The vast majority of countries set their ages in the range of 14 to 16".

    I would say a large part of what you consider appropriate vs legal is very cultural. Furthermore, most of the time the child brides get better life quality than their parents because men seeking child brides are sought after iff they have a better quality of life than the bride.

    The situation is even more complicated because when the 80-year-old husband dies, the child bride and by proxy, her family gets the most legal rights over his property.

    I would say that one ought to follow the law of the land, or do enough to get it changed, but then I also think that there is no law that's fair to everyone. I haven't picked a side on that debate yet.

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• Re:Still goes on in this day and age (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 14 2019, @04:03AM

  by khallow (3766) on Monday January 14 2019, @04:03AM (#786255) Journal

  Ok... what makes them children?

  Statistics released by the Pew Research Center show that nearly 5 in every 1,000 15–17 year olds in the United States are married - a rate of 1 in 200.

  Sounds pretty old to me.

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• Re:Still goes on in this day and age (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14 2019, @05:37PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14 2019, @05:37PM (#786510)

  Fuck off creimer I swear jesus christ please don't start shitting this place up just because you and your one man fanclub got banned from greenchan

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