NH law now bans child marriage. Rep. Cassie Levesque, 25, says work remains

CONCORD — Child marriage is now officially illegal in New Hampshire after Gov. Chris Sununu signed a bill raising the age of marriage to 18 years of age into law on Friday, June 14.

“It shows that we understand that times have changed. We are showing that the girls now of the younger generation that hey, you can decide what you want to do,” said Rep. Cassandra Levesque, D-Barrington, who has been fighting to pass this bill since 2018. “You can make your own decisions without someone getting in the way and trying to take those decision making away from you.”

With the passage and signing of SB 359, New Hampshire becomes the 13th state in the country to ban child marriage. The prime sponsor of the bill was state Sen. Debra Altschiller, D-Stratham, and Levesque was also among the sponsors.

Years of work completed in New Hampshire

It’s the culmination of years of work by Levesque, who was still a child herself when she first championed the bill.

Levesque first became interested in the subject after attending a Girl Scout workshop about human trafficking and forced child marriage presented by UNICEF, which advocates for eliminating marriages under 18 years old. In New Hampshire, the law had allowed 13-year-old girls and 14-year-old boys to get married with parent and court approval for over 100 years.

Just 17 years old and still in high school, Levesque contacted then-state Rep. Jackie Cilley, D-Barrington, who filed a bill on Levesque’s behalf to ban child marriage in New Hampshire. Sununu signed the bill into law in 2018, but it was a compromise, setting the age of marriage at 16. Levesque vowed to keep fighting to bring the age up further.

Altschiller said in a statement that from 2000 to 2023 in New Hampshire, 215 adults married children under 18 years of age. Nine of those marriages happened since the age was raised to 16.

“The reality is that child marriage is a tactic used by child traffickers to control and exploit victims, and it is not something we should allow in our state under any circumstance,” said Altschiller.

Levesque became a lawmaker in the fall of 2018, and since then tried and failed to raise the age to 18 in at least four legislative sessions.

This time, in 2024, Levesque worked with Altschiller to file the bill in the Senate.

“The House is a little harder to get through,” Levesque said, referring to her past three attempts with House bills, which were voted inexpedient to legislate or laid on the table. “I reached out to all the senators, and all of them replied back that they wanted to be on the bill, including the Senate president. And so, I've always had the full support of the Senate.”

The bill passed the Senate unanimously in March and the House 192-174 in May.

On Friday, Sununu signed the bill into law.

“I was very happy that he did sign it and very excited to see that now it's finally changed,” she said. "After much debate, we came to realize that it is time for a change, and it is time to step into more modern society."

What’s next for Levesque and the child marriage issue?

Levesque, now 25, thinks her young age helped convince other legislators of this law’s necessity. New Hampshire’s Legislature is one of the oldest in the country.

“It's been a little bit shorter time since I was 15, 16 years old,” Levesque said. “When I talked to people, they had a choice of either working or getting married and most women would get married and that was the normal. And so it shows how much our society has changed over the decades: women getting married young, having families young to 'Hey, I want to have a career, I want to build myself as a person before I find someone else, if I find someone else, and that's my choice.'”

Levesque hopes more states will follow New Hampshire and raise the minimum marriage age in their laws. She said she would “definitely” testify in other states, and organizations are looking at Maine next, where the minimum age of marriage is 17.

Editor's note: New Hampshire state Sen. Debra Altschiller, D-Stratham, is the wife of Howard Altschiller, executive editor of Seacoast Media Group.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: NH law bans child marriage. Rep. Cassie Levesque's effort succeeds