Raised in Vinton County, Bridget Crawford is a law professor at Pace University in New York.
By the time I started first grade at McArthur Elementary in Vinton County, my mother had gone away to college and returned to teach high school in her hometown, a place where she had grown up without indoor plumbing.
What she taught her students, and what she taught me, was that being poor doesn’t make you less.
My family had lived in Vinton County for at least five generations. I remember a childhood full of people who worked hard and looked out for each other. That’s the county I knew.
It isn’t the one on the front page of Ohio papers this month, after 16 children were found in a house in Vinton County in a room described as caked in feces and trash.
I understand the impulse to explain this horrific child abuse by where it happened: a poor, rural, “isolated” county in south-central Ohio. Portraying Vinton County as the kind of place people assume produces this is a convenient story.
It also isn’t true.
The children in the Siders family were allegedly abused by the four adults responsible for their care. They also were failed by an underfunded social services system that did not have the resources to locate the parents when six of the Siders children failed to attend school for an entire year, and apparently no one went looking for them since. And they were failed by Ohio law.
How Ohio law failed Vinton County’s Siders children
Of the 2,541 children married in Ohio since 2000, 96% married adults. The law even permitted 10-year-olds to marry. At least two marriages involving 10-year-olds occurred in 2017. The grooms in those marriages were ages 32 and 48.
That’s not a Vinton County problem.
That’s an Ohio problem.
In 2019, Ohio raised the marriage age to 18 after reporting by then-Dayton Daily News reporter Laura Bischoff, now a Dispatch journalist, made lawmakers act. It was a real fix, as far as it went, but left a loophole: 17-year-olds are allowed to marry under certain conditions.
To be clear, the marriages in the Siders family itself predate that reform entirely. Elizabeth Russell married co-defendant Gary Siders Jr. at 15 in 2008 in West Virginia. The couple had the first of their 18 children two months later.
Two other family members married as teenagers in Gallia County in 2002 and 2003, years before Ohio had any real age floor. One was 14 and pregnant when she married a 48-year-old member of the Siders family. The other was 15 when she married Gary Siders’s now deceased cousin.
That timing doesn’t make the current loophole less urgent, though. It shows how recently Ohio law offered almost no protection and how much of that gap Columbus still hasn’t closed.
Girls shouldn’t marry men in Ohio
Ohio state Sens. Louis Blessing R-District 8, and Bill DeMora, D-District 25, have a bipartisan bill that would close what’s left of the child-marriage loophole.
The bill stalled this year after some Republican senators opposed it (but not on the record).
Ohio still won’t sell a 17-year-old a pack of cigarettes. It will let her marry.
But child marriage is associated with higher birth rates and lower educational attainment, health and lifetime earnings. It is time to pass the bill.
To be clear, child marriage does not cause poverty or abuse. But poverty strains families and governmental resources alike.
Vinton County shares its family services agency with two other counties. There is no acute-care facility there, so residents often must travel to neighboring Athens County for their health needs. Caseworkers cover too much ground.
Last budget cycle, the legislature had the chance to fund the Ohio Department of Children and Youth properly, but underfunded it by tens of millions instead.
A headline about horrific abuse doesn’t represent Vinton County’s people, history or traditions. The adults who abused these children should be held accountable. But let’s also hold Ohio law accountable. These children’s mother was allowed to be married as a child herself.
Ohio cannot undo the suffering of these abused children. Ohio can’t undo what this family did. But it can at least end a law that lets adults marry children.
Pass the bill.
Bridget Crawford is a law professor at Pace University in New York.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: 16 kids were found in a feces-filled house. Ohio law helped tragedy happen | Opinion
Reporting by Bridget J. Crawford, Guest Columnist / The Columbus Dispatch
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Bridget J. Crawford, Guest Columnist | USA TODAY Network
