This Is What It's Like to Be a Mom at 10 and Married at 11 in Florida
Johnson was forced to marry her rapist to help him evade punishment.
Sherry Johnson is a child marriage survivor, an author, and an activist.
At age 11, she was forced to marry her rapist after she gave birth to his child, allowing him — a church deacon — to escape legal punishment for his crime, and robbing her of her childhood. But Johnson is just one of 700 million women worldwide who was married as a child, based on UNICEF’s data.
A Florida native, Johnson has now made it her mission to ensure that no other child meets the same fate she did. Her goal is to shed light on the issue of child marriage in the US, where, depending on the circumstances, marriage before the age of 18 is permitted in all 50 states, according to Human Rights Watch.
Between 2000 and 2010, more than 167,000 children were married before their 17th birthdays in 38 states, according to the non-profit Unchained At Last. Nearly 10% of those children, like Johnson, were married in Florida — one of 25 states where a child of any age can be married off under certain circumstances.
Johnson’s story of strength and resilience is below, as told to Global Citizen.
There are so many simple things I didn’t get the chance to do.
I never played with dolls or used my imagination to make up lives for them the way many other children did because I had a real doll — one I had to make real decisions for. I had to feed my daughter real food, change real diapers that I washed by hand and hung on the line.
And I was 10 years old.
I survived being raped at age 8 by the church bishop and then by my mom’s husband. When I was 9, I was raped again, this time by the deacon of the church.
I got pregnant.
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This is utterly horrifying. Should be spread far and wide, byt sadly the pro life dipshits only encourage this sort of thing and probably even make it worse. 
to these creeps? If you can hang onto that feeling, though, you'll understand why some anti-abortion types loathe all Democrats for cutting up term babies in the womb before they can be born. 
religion makes good people better and bad people worse to keep it going for sure.
A minister who owned and ran his own church and school used to live across the road with his family. He wore his "bad" on his mean, suspicious face, and boy he apparently nailed us as not righteous, godly people even before our first meeting. He was careful to keep his family away from evil influences, and we almost never spoke. Happily his church failed and they moved, though I'm afraid his nice wife and daughters are probably still with him.
