I've had a number of people asking me if I'd had a chance to read this article yet. The answer is yes, I have. And I know it takes place in Nebraska, where I grew up, and Kansas, where I briefly attended college.
What I can't answer is which part of this terribly tragic story saddened me more. There's the fact that Kansas allows marriage at the age of 12, then there's the poor little girl can't see more of a future for herself than being married and a mother at 14. She has no interest in college, and thinks that being a nurse requires nothing more than a high school diploma.
The parents, as they always seem to be in these situations, either were not or chose not to be in touch enough with their children to know what was going on right under their noses. And then there is the emotionally immature, learning disabled "husband", who didn't have the judgment to see how imprudent this type of relationship was and remove himself from it. Someone had to be the adult, but sadly it appears that nobody was interested in filling the role.
The prison question is a hard one for me. When I worked with pregnant and parenting teenagers, many of their children were fathered by men who were in their 20's while the girls were still in their teens. In one case, the girl was 14 and the man was 22. The sad, twisted thing about it was that often Social Services would (often the custodial "parent") would refuse to press charges against the men because the only source of emotional support the poor girls had were the families of their abusers. I don't know one of these men who treated these girls well; often they seemed to collect lonely, unloved teenagers and had at least two children whose mothers did not have their driver's license. These men should have been arrested, but they walked; the one thing I can say about this child/man is that at least he's still there. And he does seem to be trying to do right by his family, although I have a feeling that the grandparents are carrying more of the burden than was disclosed.
Eventually, I think these kids will tire of playing house and divorce. Hopefully all of the children involved (and I'm including the parents in this, because they are children, too) will escape relatively undamaged.