For nine years, Sara Tasneem made the frequent pilgrimage from her home in El Sobrante to Sacramento to share her experience being forced into marriage at the age of 15 to a man nearly twice her age. Tasneem, now 45, would visit legislator after legislator — up to 20 per day — and tell them the impact the abuse had on her life, often bringing everyone in the room to tears.
Tasneem experienced a huge win Wednesday as she stood among other survivors of child marriage behind Gov. Gavin Newsom as he signed into law Assembly Bill 1267, which makes California the 18th state to ban child marriage.
“Frankly, it’s surreal,” Tasneem said. “To have the governor actually sign the bill in front of me was a bit shocking. … After he signed it, I just broke down crying because it was such an impactful moment for me and just a huge moment for all of the survivors who have been fighting for this.”
The bill, authored by Assemblymember Gail Pellegrin, D-Santa Cruz, and coauthored by 38 legislators, sets the minimum age for marriage at 18 — eliminating previous state laws that made California one of only four states to not have any minimum age for marriage — and follows more than nine years of effort among lawmakers and child marriage advocates to end the practice, according to a news release from Pellegrin’s office. No lawmakers in the California Senate and State Assembly voted against the bill.
California law previously only required the permission of a parent and a judge for a person of any age to marry.
“It was so heartwarming to see the survivors finally be recognized and to validate their life experiences and to know that we never want any other child to go through what they’ve gone through,” Pellerin said on Thursday. “Our colleagues over the years have been frustrated with the fact that this bill has not been able to get through committees and to the governor’s desk, and there was just a lot of support and dedication to let’s get this done this year. We were fired up, and we saw an open window and we jumped through it.”
The bill was also co-sponsored by Unchained at Last, an organization that advocates for the end of child marriage in all 50 states, and the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls. Girl Scouts passed out bracelets to advocate for its passage, Pellerin said.
“This is a long overdue measure to protect young Californians and minors,” Newsom said in a news release. “Today, California kids are safer than ever before.”
Marrying under the age of 18 carries of host of negative impacts on a child’s life, including high levels of abuse, financial dependency and a lack of access to education, Pellerin said. Organizations such as United Nations Children’s Fund and Human Rights Watch have deemed it child abuse and a human rights abuse.
“This is a huge victory. We have banned a human rights abuse that destroys girls’ lives here in the Golden State, and this sets us up well to do the same in states around the world,” said Fraidy Reiss, the co-founder of Unchained at Last and a survivor of child marriage herself. “Health, education, economic opportunities, physical safety, sexual rights, reproductive rights — almost every aspect of a girl’s life is destroyed or undermined by a marriage before the age of 18.”
Iterations of the bill introduced in previous years faced opposition from Planned Parenthood Affiliates of Northern California, ACLU California Action and the National Center for Youth Law, which argued that a restriction on marriage under 18 would limit the rights of those who under age 18 who willingly wanted to marry or drive abusive relationships underground. In 2024, that caused the bill to stall in a committee led by Assemblymember Ash Kalra, D-San Jose, who at the time told advocates that they needed to come to the table with Planned Parenthood.
Advocates argued that any attempts to lower the age from 18 would water down the bill, as 96% of minors who are forced into marriage are 16 or 17 years old. Minors who are 16 or 17 would still be considered runaways if they attempted to leave home to get out of a forced marriage, Reiss said, limiting their ability to get help from advocacy organizations.
There were further disputes about how many children were impacted by the practice of child marriage as advocates and the opposing organizations pointed to radically different datasets.
But this year, Planned Parenthood agreed to remain neutral on the issue, Pellerin said, which “helped open that window a little wider.”
“It felt like for the first time we really had a way forward after so many years of trying to come to the table,” Tasneem said, adding that Kalra redeemed himself by passing the bill through his committee this time around.
Tasneem and other advocates have been pushing for an end to child marriage for years, putting themselves through the difficult and often retraumatizing task of recounting their experiences — all with the aim of preventing others from going through it, she said.
“I never intended to be an advocate,” Tasneem said. “It’s difficult because you share your story and you hope that the laws will change to protect minors from the abuse and sometimes it’s not enough, and that’s where it gets really difficult for the folks who have to really share their trauma.”
Pellerin attributed that “persistence of our survivors” as an essential part of the bill’s passage.
“We also really pointed out the hypocrisy, most notably that the age of sexual consent in California is 18 without exception, meaning that any individual who engages in sexual intercourse with a minor can be charged with statutory rape — unless that individual is the spouse of the minor,” Pellerin said.
Tasneem added that the work to end child marriage is not finished. She would like to see a waiting period implemented on minor marriages until the law goes into effect next year — and added that more work needs to be done in the communities where child marriage is happening and in other states predators can travel to to obtain marriage licenses with minors.
“That is the hardest part is to think about the thousands of children who we potentially could have saved since 2017 when we first proposed the bill until now,” Tasneem said. “I think about all those girls.”