Barrington 18-year-old returns to Legislature in hopes of raising New Hampshire marriage age to 16

The issue of child marriage is a personal one for 18-year-old Cassandra Levesque.

Not just because of what happened last year, when the then-senior at Dover High School watched state legislators kill a bill she had pioneered for a Girl Scouts project, which would have raised New Hampshire’s minimum marriage age – currently 13 for girls and or 14 for boys – to 18 years old.

The issue became more personal for Levesque after she realized, while researching her own family, that both her grandmother and great-grandmother had been married under the age of 18. Levesque’s great-grandmother was 16 when she married her then-49-year-old husband.

It was a story Levesque told Tuesday during a hearing for a new set of bills related to the age of marriage in New Hampshire.

Read more: http://www.concordmonitor.com/The-issue-of-child-marriage-returns-to-the-NH-legislature-14931545