Mmmmm... you're missing a critical piece here. It was tied in with the marriage laws. It was more commonplace at the time for families to "marry off" their daughters to say, a wealthy farmer the next town over. However, they typically did NOT procreate until she reached child bearing age.
Right or wrong? Debatable. Often times the parents marrying their daughters off did not have the means to continue raising or to educate their daughters so this was a way to give their daughters an opportunity they might not otherwise have. The husband might provide money for an education and in exchange, his wife would handle housework, making clothes, and meals. Sex typically wasn't part of the deal until she got much older.
Obviously, this got changed due to abuse and the advent of public school systems....
Quoting: Constant Parad0x Certainly not arguing with the scenarios of marriage you described. (Ofc even biologically it makes sense.)
But you're leaving out the fact that age of consent laws do not - and never did - apply within adult-child marriages. i.e. The laws were only relevant outside of marriage, outside of your scenario.
So the Johns story I guess was not relevant.
A 1576 law making it a felony to "unlawfully and carnally know and abuse any woman child under the age of 10 years" was generally interpreted as creating more severe punishments when girls were under 10 years old while retaining the lesser punishment for acts with 10- and 11-year-old girls.
There was one exception: a man's acts with his wife, to which rape law, and hence the age of consent, did not apply.
Quoting: University of Sydney, Australia [
link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)] (See archive of citation 104 - blocked by GLP)
So that would be the basis for cases like this:
11-year-old girl 'forced to marry her rapist' from church in Florida
[
link to www.independent.co.uk (secure)]
When investigators began looking into her case, she claims her family tried to protect her rapist by forcing her to marry him.
“My mom asked me if I wanted to get married, and I said, ‘I don’t know, what is marriage, how do I act like a wife?’” Ms Johnson told The New York Times. “She said, ‘Well, I guess you’re just going to get married.’”
Quoting: The IndependentSomething happened to the NYT article, but 10 years ago quite a few states including Florida permitted that.
