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Rotary magazine presents a Bride Too soon, written by Ellie Fishman and published in the print version of Rotary magazine. I'm Linda Yoo. Freddie Reese has a tight 90 minutes between her morning meetings. She just got off a call with her staff, and she's soon due on another with a group of legislators on who have taken up the cause to end forced and child marriage. It's an especially warm fall afternoon, and Reese considers whether to turn on the unit air conditioner that sits in a nearby window. Her New Jersey office is small and humble by design. As the founder of Unchained At Last, an activist group that works to end forced marriage and child marriage in the United States, Reese does not want her offices to be found for fear of retaliation from the people and communities both she and her clients have worked hard to escape. Reese is clad in her typical uniform, a skirt that sits well above the knee and platform shoes that add no less than three inches to her petite frame. She's also wearing her signature bright red lipstick. I'm having my teenage rebellion in my 40s, says Reese with a laugh. I finally get the opportunity to express myself through clothing, and I'm really enjoying that. But even with minimal layers, Reese feels the heat sinking in. She decides to turn on the air. As she crosses the room, Reese passes a collection of photos hung on the wall. One features the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, another US Senator Elizabeth Warren. Anita Hill, the lawyer and professor who accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment holds a place, as does Christine Blasey Ford, who made even more serious allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. A phrase above the photos proclaims the Wall of Gutsy Women. They serve as an ad hoc council, arbiters of strength and courage who oversee the organization's daily business. Not that Rhys necessarily needs such guidance. She's used to forging her own path. Seventeen years ago, Riis made a change that few ultra Orthodox Jews ever do. She left an abusive arranged marriage, and as a result, she also left her family and community and began her life anew. Forge is perhaps too tempered a word for what Riis accomplished. Rather, she clawed her way out and willfully carved her own path. And while Riis's office hardly advertises itself as a desired destination, every book, poster and rip in the carpet represents the life she so fiercely fought for. And it's here, in this stuffy room with a single air conditioning unit, that that Reese, in her miniskirts and crimson lips, now fights for those same freedoms. For thousands of women across the country When Riis considers the beginning of her story, she pauses. What people don't understand is in the Orthodox Jewish community, it begins as soon as you were verbal, reflects Riis. There was always an understanding that I was not going to have a choice about whether and when to marry. Despite her early indoctrination, Riis, who was born the second youngest of six, did not hold a particularly romantic perspective on marriage. When Reese was only four years old, her mother fled their family home with Riis and her siblings in the middle of the night. My father was very, very violent and abusive, says Reese, who explains that her parents were also brought together in an arranged marriage. In response to reports of extreme domestic violence, a rabbi made the rare decision to grant Reese's mother permission to leave her husband. It would be another seven years before Riis's father granted a divorce. Under Orthodox Jewish law, only the husband has the power to divorce his wife. Watching her mother live in that limbo between separation and divorce weighed heavily on Reese. She was considered an aguna, or a chained woman whose husband won't give her a divorce, says Reese, who recalls hearing her mother cry herself to sleep at night. It's a hellish experience. Instead of getting support from the community, you're shamed for your helplessness. My mother was doubly victimized. The experience raised many questions for a young Riis, queries she was told to temper. I remember saying things like, why can't a woman grant a divorce? Says Riis. The misogyny of it never made sense to me. And because I asked those questions, I was considered someone to keep an eye on. Neither Reese's mother's saga nor the young girl's probing, however, alter Reese's own fate to marry at 19. Like her mother and nearly every woman of their horridy Jewish community, Riis was paired with a husband through a matchmaker. Riis had her first daughter at 20 and her second at 24. By 27, Riis found herself trapped in a familiar script. Her husband, like her father, was violent and abusive. But when she approached her mother looking for safe haven, Rhys says her mother turned her away. I told her I was scared for my life, recalls Reese. I told her my husband made it clear that he was going to kill me. Rather than respond to Reese's fears, her mother simply turned away. She just walked out of the room. She didn't even answer me. That response broke Reese's heart. Looking back, Reese believes that her mother's dismissal reflected the long abused woman's own trauma. That was the best she could do reflects Reece. The memory still brings tears to her eyes. After all that she endured and how little she had dealt with her own trauma, I think the only thing she could do was leave the room and pretend the conversation never happened. Her mother never brought up the topic with her daughter again, and the last time Reese spoke to her mother was was before Riis decided to leave the Orthodox Jewish community for good. Child and forced marriage practices, explains Riis, rarely exist in a vacuum. Forced marriages are almost always part of a cycle that's been going on for generations, and those cycles are spread far and wide across America. This is a national issue. It impacts every community or religion and socioeconomic level you can think of. According to data collected by Reese and her colleagues at Unchained at last, nearly 300,000 minors were legally married in the United States between the year 2000 and 2018. Up until 2018, child marriage remained legal in every state. While some states have a minimum age requirement of 18, most allow for minors to marry with parental or judicial consent. Because marriage is regulated by the states, there is no federal law that bans child marriage. That means in most states across the country, minors can be forced into a marriage without the ability to exit one. Most wedded minors included in the research were 16 or 17 years old when they married, though the report suggests that children as young as 10 have been compelled into marriage. Among the minors married during that period, 86% were girls, and most were wed to adult men, and they came from areas and groups across the United States. While arranged marriage is common in many cultures, including some Orthodox Jewish communities, other factors such as societal and family pressure, call into question the issue of consent, blurring the lines between an arranged marriage and the abusive practice of a forced marriage. Studies have shown that child marriage is more common among religious and immigrant groups and in some Southern states with permissive laws, including Tennessee and West Virginia. Over the last six years, Reese and her Unchained At Last team have helped to get legislation passed prohibiting child marriage in 13 states. Delaware led the change in 2018, becoming the first state to set the minimum marriage age at 18 and effectively ban child marriage. It was soon followed by New Jersey. Other states that have since enacted similar laws include Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, and most recently, New Hampshire, all setting the legal minimum age for marriage at 18. But overturning the practice in every US state appears an uphill battle when the Wyoming Republican Party, for example, voice to concerns that restricting child marriage could prevent teen parents from raising their children together. Similarly, a Republican legislature in West Virginia opposed a ban on child marriage, contending that such restrictions would push young people to cross state lines to seek a marriage license. And lawmakers in several states argue that certain extenuating circumstances religious and cultural customs or teen pregnancy, for example are are reasons to leave the laws unchanged. But Reese is not without conservative allies. Missouri state Senator Holly Thompson Redder, a Republican, stands among those hoping to change more state laws. Years ago, when our great grandparents got married at 14 or 15, women didn't have equality, says Thompson Redder, who went through a child marriage. And so Thompson Redder, who is vocal in her opposition to abortion, access and gun control, remains an advocate to end child marriage. Now we have the same opportunity that men do to become educated, to become the breadwinners. Us getting married early cuts off our opportunity. A report published by the International center for Research on Women notes that girls who marry before 19 have historically been more likely to drop out of school and complete fewer years of their education than their peers who marry later. According to the World bank, child marriage is strongly linked to higher rates of economic dependency, lower earnings and greater likelihood of living in poverty. And then there's the social and psychological impact. Some research suggests that teenage brides have higher rates of psychological stress. We want better for our girls, insists Thompson Redder. While Thompson Redder says that she's found enthusiastic support among women in the Missouri Senate, legislation banning child marriage faces numerous hurdles. One reason for that, believes Reese, is that most Americans don't want to look at the alarming realities of forced and child marriages. It can feel like shouting at a void, she says. But that isn't sacriese. I've always been a fighter. Around the time that Riis's mother ignored her daughter's plea for help, Riis filed a temporary restraining order against her husband. It didn't last long. A rabbi sent a lawyer to take Riis to the courthouse to withdraw it. That's when the mother of two understood that if she wanted to break loose from her marriage, she'd have to do it on her own. In the following weeks, Riis made a five year plan. First, she started hiding money in a cereal box, like a lot of abusers. My husband would buy me jewelry after he was really violent, says Reese. But he had the worst taste. The pieces may have been ugly, but they were also expensive. Reese would return the jewelry and take the cash in its place, sometimes as much as fifteen hundred dollars. I didn't want jewelry. I wanted my freedom. Reese also started pocketing money her husband gave her for new wigs which can cost upward of $5,000. Normally, Reese explains, Orthodox Jewish women may buy two new wigs a year because the hairpieces, often worn for modesty over their natural hair, oxidized over time. I would blow dry and wash my old wigs, explains Reece. It's really hard to make them look new. But I figured it out. Reese enrolled in the undergraduate program at Rutgers University, a decision that made her husband furious. But I said, how exactly are you going to stop me? Says Reese. My whole family tried to stop me, but I insisted. By the time Reese graduated five years later, at age 32, she'd stashed away $40,000. Over a decade into her marriage, Reese changed the locks on her house and filed for divorce. She was finally in a stable enough situation to leave her husband for good. Her first job was working as a reporter at the Asbury Park Press. She later left that job for one as a private investigator. When she bought her own house, Reese and her two daughters named it Palais de Triomphe. The house meant that not only had I left a bad situation, says Reese, but that I'd arrived at a better one. In 2015, Reese left her job as an investigator to work for Unchained, at last full time. Since then, she has grown the organization to eight employees with more than $2 million in total assets. Reese's platform and visibility have grown, too. She now stands among the country's most vocal activists speaking out against child and forced marriage. She publishes op eds in outlets around the country and works directly with legislators to craft bills that push to support domestic violence survivors and end the practice of child enforced marriage. And when Rotary International was looking for someone to speak about ending child marriage at a Rotary Day with UNICEF convocation in 2022 devoted to empowering girls, it turned to riis. A lot of people don't realize child marriage is a real problem here in the United States, said Reese, addressing the live AUD audience at UNICEF headquarters in New York City and Rotary members around the world who attended the webinar. The reason, she said, was the dangerous, archaic, misogynistic laws that remain on the books. That's despite the fact, she continued, that the US State Department considers marriage before 18 a human rights abuse because the devastating, lifelong repercussions that it produces are just as egregious and serious here in the US as they are overseas. The webinar, which introduced six people of action champions of girls empowerment and addressed topics such as menstrual hygiene, mental health, remote learning and breaking barriers for girls, is available@om.rotary.org UNICEF Day. As for those first five women, Reese hoped to help share their story and start a new life. That number now totals close to 1,000, 1,000 women for whom Reese and her Unchained team have helped craft escape plans, find emergency shelter and connect with pro bono legal counsel and career and psychiatric counseling. What's more, Unchained brings survivors together to share their experiences with one another, an invaluable therapeutic resource. Jennifer Brown is one of those women. At 16, Brown was married to a 23 year old man she'd only known for two months. The marriage, says Brown, was the idea of her stepmother, who Brown says wanted the teenager out of the house. For whatever reason, she didn't like me, recalls Brown. And she found out this guy wanted to marry me and she convinced my dad to marry me off. Brown was a sophomore at her Mississippi high school when her father walked her down the aisle. She wore a wedding dress that her sister in law found at a dry cleaner where she worked. Brown describes the following two years as miserable. She says her husband was abusive and would regularly fall into fits of rage. But Brown still clung to the relationship. I didn't know anything else, she says. Brown reached a breaking point a year and a half into the marriage. After a particularly brutal fight. I took my husband's truck one night and drove to a cousin's house, recalls Brown. They say it takes seven times for a woman to leave an abusive partner, and that feels very true to me. Brown only started to consider what she had experienced when she began seeing a therapist years later. It took me a very, very long time to process, says Brown, who was diagnosed with complex post traumatic stress disorder. As she reflected on her early life, Brown decided to search for other child marriage survivors. In 2015, she did an Internet search on child marriage and the website for Unchained popped up. Brown wrote I was married at 16 on the group's Facebook page, and someone from Reese's team reached out to ask whether Brown wanted to share her story. At first, Brown was hesitant, but when she started to discuss her story, she found the process powerful. It felt good to know that there was a tribe of women who had similar experiences and that my story wasn't an isolated thing, she says. It felt good, but also horrifying. That's one reason Brown shared her story in a three minute fake reality show trailer called Unseen Housewives. Produced by Unchained, the video is edited to mimic the familiar rhythms of reality television while teasing the true stories of Brown and three other women who were pressured to marry as teenagers. Reese presented the short film, which is both slick and jarring, at an event held in conjunction with a 2023 session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. She ended with the trailer's tagline, which reads, the show must not go on. Back at the Unchained office, the air conditioner provides a humming soundtrack to Reese's stories. In a few minutes, Reese will hop on another of her frequent video conference calls, this one with a team of Columbia University researchers who are partnering with Unchained to run a three year study on forced marriage, forced marital, sexual and forced parenthood in the United States. It's the first study of its kind, says Riis, excited. Our goal is to come up with policy recommendations and push for those policies to be implemented. Research is one way Riis and her team advocate for change. Protest is another. In 2015, Riis started hosting what she calls chain ins, or gatherings of women donning bridal gowns and chains who come together to protest child and forced marriage. Reese has held 20 across the country, including several on the steps of state Capitol buildings in Michigan, California and Washington, among others. The visual, a group of women in wedding dresses with black tape covering their mouths, is a powerful one, and Rhys says that it has inspired women all over the country to send her there with wedding dresses. Unchained now has an inventory of dozens of donated wedding dresses, all of which are organized and catalog at the Unchained offices. We're constantly getting bridal gowns, she says. I just got three more today. As she continues her fight, Riis travels all over the country promoting Unchained's mission to hundreds of policymakers, advocates and survivors. But while the big podiums matter, Reese says quiet moments hold importance, too, like the words of wisdom she shares with her daughters, who are now young adults, the kind of advice Rhys wishes she might have received some 30 years ago. The message I wish I had heard is you deserve help, she says, and you can get it. Freddie Reese will make sure of that. This recording was produced by JP Sweet Swenson EDITED by Wen Huang Production by Joe desault this article appeared in a print issue of Rotary magazine. Rotary magazine is a publication of Rotary International. I'm Linda Yu. Thank you for listening.