Their life expectancy is also shorter than that of their monogamous sisters. In addition, their children, both boys and girls, are less likely to receive both primary and secondary education. There are those who might argue that it is precisely because of the illegality of polygamy that these groups are kept from joining mainstream society. But McDermott suggests that another factor is at work:.
Polygynist cultures need to create and sustain an underclass of unmarried and undereducated men, since in order to sustain a system where a few men possess all the women, roughly half of boys must leave the community before adulthood. Such societies also spend more money on weapons and display fewer social and political freedoms than do monogamous ones.
When small numbers of men control large numbers of women, the remaining men are likely to be willing to take greater risks and engage in more violence, possibly including terrorism, in order to increase their own wealth and status in hopes of gaining access to women.
Along with female genital mutilation, a polygamous structure is fundamental to the structure of these communities, and related to their general sense of lawlessness. Prosecutors in the U. But because polygamy has so many clear side effects—girls are typically assigned to a man at an age far below the age of consent, large groups of boys are often expelled from these communities, children are generally kept from receiving any kind of education—it is possible to know when and where polygamy is being practiced.
Letting the men who run these communities have free rein and the stamp of approval from the federal government will only deepen the social problems polygamy causes.
And the victims will become more helpless than they already are. Sign up for our mailing list to receive ongoing updates from IFS.
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Is there any sense of why they are moving to Arizona? Skip to main content. By Sarah Ventre, Lauren Gilger. Published: Friday, August 3, - pm. Download mp3 8. In North American fundamentalist Mormon communities, there tends to be considerable social pressure for young girls to marry older husbands who will have multiple wives Macedo, , If they attempt to leave a marriage, they risk losing their social and economic stability, as they are likely to be shunned by their community.
What about the Colombian men? Given the problems associated with polygyny, the justification for liberal democracies banning hub-and-spokes polygamy seems reasonable. In particular, the key problems with such marriages that I would highlight are:. But what does this analysis suggest should be done in the case of the Colombian men? It is clear that their legal relationship does not fit into the same category as fundamentalist polygynous marriages; from everything we can glean about their relationship, it does not seem to suffer from any of the problems mentioned above.
This primarily stems from the fact that their relationship is not hub-and-spokes polygamy, but is instead a polyamorous relationship. Polyamorous relationships normally lack a central-spouse-like figure who controls the relationship arrangement, but rather work on the basis of every member of the relationship having an equal say in decision-making. This difference significantly reduces concerns about partners not truly consenting to the arrangement.
There is also, so far, no evidence to suggest that polyamory correlates with any empirical harms. General trends in research indicate that polyamorists have similar psychological well-being and relationship quality as monogamists Rubel and Bogaert, , I believe that there is no justified reason for states to prevent polyamorists like the Colombian men from marrying.
Webbed marriage would allow those who want to have multi-person marriages to do so without cause for concern. In a webbed marriage, every person involved in a relationship has to be legally married to every other member of the relationship. Each person would sign the terms of a collective marriage contract, thereby creating a marital web: a legally binding contractual relationship between them and every other person in the relationship.
After this initial contract is created, the legal consent of all spouses would be required before any further people are allowed to join the marital web. If at any point a spouse wanted to divorce from the web, the terms of the original contract would be changed; therefore, the other spouses would have to legally consent once again if they wanted to continue being part of the web.
These stipulations mean that in a webbed marriage, each person would be able to veto any proposed change in the structure of the marital web, except for being unable to prevent other members from leaving the marriage.
At the moment, there may be good reasons to keep hub-and-spokes polygamy illegal. However, multiple-person marriages, in general, should not be prevented. The major benefit of this would be that it would finally allow polyamorists to get married. This would be a significant new option for many of them. Therefore, webbed marriage, if properly fleshed out by local policymakers for their own contexts, could provide an unproblematic form of marriage that is ideal for polygamists, and deserves serious consideration for legalisation in current liberal democracies.
For more information on the upcoming Conference see here. Hassouneh-Phillips, D.
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