Michael McLaughlin, The San Francisco Standard
Christina Sutton was at a grocery store parking lot in Napa County on the night her life changed. It was 1993, and the 16-year-old and her friends were hoping to find someone old enough to buy them beer. Along came a 21-year-old guy in the Coast Guard, whom one of her friends knew. After a quick discussion among the teens, Sutton got the assignment to approach him.
“I was the one that was deemed the cutest looking that day and got pushed over to say, ‘Hi, m. My friend recognized you and wondered if you would buy us beer,’” she said.
He happily obliged. Sutton and her friends wound up drinking with him and his roommates at his house that night. The rest, as they say, is history. But it’s the kind of history that Sutton is trying to rewrite for girls in her position.
Less than a year after that encounter, Sutton married the man from the parking lot. She’d dropped out of high school too. A year after her wedding, she gave birth to a daughter. At 20, she had a second daughter. She briefly worked in retail but had no prospects outside of raising the kids.
“The storyline is that I had a boyfriend and wanted to get married, and my parents said OK — that’s one version of my storyline,” Sutton said. “The other is that soon after I turned 16, a man started pursuing me. … I don’t describe it as a relationship. I describe it as a pursuit.”
Sutton, who divorced after five years and is now a real estate agent in San Francisco, is pushing for legislation that would prohibit marriage in California for anyone under 18. The state Senate is expected to vote soon, possibly this week, on the bill. It has already cleared the Assembly.
Critics of child marriages say the consequences can be severe. Educational and job opportunities shrink. It also creates a gray area in terms of sexual violence, as statutory rape laws generally do not apply if the underage victim is married to the abuser. The odds of a lasting marriage are small. The California Coalition to End Child Marriage says 70% to 80% of underage marriages end in divorce.
Sutton said her husband was psychologically abusive and unsupportive. The mismatch was encapsulated by a conversation they had when Sutton broached the idea of enrolling in community college classes while her first daughter was a baby.
“He said, ‘Go ahead, as long as it doesn’t cost me any money or affect raising the baby,’” Sutton recalled. “In that marriage, I felt so objectified. I was something he showed off. We went places so he could have people meet me. I was so out of my depth in an adult world. It was like playing house. I was going through all the motions.”
California, New Mexico, and Mississippi are the only states that do not have a minimum age requirement for marriage. Thirty other states allow marriage for 15- to 17-year-olds with parental consent or court approval, according to reports. Attitudes toward marriage have evolved, but many of the laws reflect views from generations ago.
“Child marriage is fundamentally a child protection issue. This is something we have to do to protect kids,” said Assemblymember Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz County), who authored the bill to institute 18 as the minimum age for marriage. “Everything we are hearing is that when young girls end up in a marriage, they face lifelong consequences. Even if the numbers are small, every child deserves protection.”
There’s another piece of legislation designed to deal with a related issue — coercive marriage. Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) has drafted a law that empowers people facing marriage against their will to get restraining orders against someone trying to force them to marry. That bill has passed the Assembly and is awaiting action by the state Senate.
To be married before turning 18 in California requires jumping through some hoops. The minor and at least one parent must be interviewed by an official from Family Court Services, which must submit a report about any findings of coercion. A judge must also interview the would-be spouses to determine if pressure is being applied to the underage person.
These safeguards are not strong enough, according to Sutton. She said that her upbringing had involved “really challenging life experiences” and that her parents did not have her best interests at heart. Though it wasn’t required by law then, a judge interviewed Sutton about the marriage. She was persuasive that she was ready to wed, she said.
“I looked in the judge’s face and said, ‘I’m very mature for my age,’” Sutton said.
Child marriage is more common across the U.S. than many people realize. Unchained At Last, an organization advocating for an end to the practice, said nearly 315,000 children were legally entered into marriage across the U.S. between 2000 and 2021.
“The vast majority were girls wed to adult men,” the group claims.
A well-known example involved actor Doug Hutchinson, known for roles in “The Green Mile” and “Lost,” marrying 16-year-old model Courtney Stodden in Las Vegas in 2011. They divorced in 2020. Stodden is advocating for the ban in California.
“i [sic] don’t want to be remembered only as the child the world watched. i want to be remembered as the woman who made the world look again,” she wrote in a July Instagram post after lobbying for the law in Sacramento. “i cannot rewrite my childhood, but i can spend the rest of my life helping rewrite the future for children who deserve more freedom, more protection, and more choices than i had.”
The push to end underage marriage has been gaining momentum. New Jersey and Delaware were the first states to prohibit it for anyone under 18 in 2018. The issue has taken on a higher profile with Chelsea Clinton advocating for bans. The issue is also a focus of the current best-selling memoir “All That’s Unseen,” by Emilee Hackney, about her coming-of-age in Appalachia. She writes about becoming engaged at 16 to an older man, and later broke it off after her fiancé was jailed on charges related to child pornography.
In California, there are a handful of child marriages each year, according to state records. In 2025, there were 10 weddings that involved a person younger than 18 out of 227,300 marriage licenses issued, according to the California Department of Public Health. That number has stayed basically constant since 2019, when a new state law required an annual tally of underage marriages. That year had the highest number of child marriages — 17 out of 217,796.
The Public Health Department records show that child marriages are distributed across the state’s 58 counties. Many counties, including San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin, have not recorded any marriages involving a minor since 2019. San Diego County had four in 2019, the most of any county.
However, the accuracy of the state numbers is under scrutiny. While the Public Health Department said Los Angeles had four marriages involving a minor from 2019 to -2025, county data obtained by TV station CBS8 (KFMB) in San Diego showed 12 such marriages during the same time span.
Unchained At Last claimed it’s far more common. There were nearly 8,800 15- to 17-year-olds in California in 2021 who’d reported getting married in the previous year, according to the group’s analysis of U.S. Census data. Unchained told CalMatters that the jarring discrepancy stemmed from county registrars who don’t track child marriages.
Opposition to California’s proposed ban comes from ACLU California Action. The civil liberties organization says “prohibiting minors from marrying in every case is a departure from California’s longstanding commitment to honoring minors’ ability to make important personal decisions for themselves,” comparing it to the a minor’s ability to have an abortion or carry a pregnancy to term, according to a June letter to Pellerin from the organization. “Eliminating it entirely removes the option of marriage as a potential pathway even in those circumstances where a minor, in consultation with parents or legal guardians and subject to the discretion of a judicial body, seeks out the critical benefits and legal protections that marriage can provide.”
ACLU California Action declined to comment further about its position.
Planned Parenthood has opposed earlier efforts to pass the legislation in California but has not taken a stand on the current push. Pellerin hopes that without that group standing in the way, her bill will get passed. Planned Parenthood did not respond to The Standard’s inquiries.
For Sutton, it can’t happen soon enough. It took years for her to rebuild her life. She got a GED and worked in retail for years before getting her real estate license, which has given her greater financial stability. Therapy has helped with the psychological effects.
“I had this tiny glimmer of self-preservation,” she said. “One day I just knew I had to get out.”
