When Cassie Levesque was 15, she attended a Girl Scout Conference in Rhode Island where she learned about Child Marriage and discovered that it was happening not only across the globe, but it also here in the United States also. This knowledge set Cassie on a journey to become an advocate against child marriage. Cassie has now been working for three years to raise the marriage age in New Hampshire.
After learning about child marriage at her Girl Scout Conference, she was intrigued by the subject and had a lot of questions. Her Girl Scout leader encouraged her to research the subject and find out more information. She started researching child marriage and was stunned to find that children as young as 13 were allowed to marry in New Hampshire. She was determined to stop that practice. After months of research, she felt that she had enough information to talk to her local Representative, Jackie Cilley, and see if they could use that information to change the law. Little did they know when they first met that they would spark a national conversation and go down a road that would take them from Barrington, New Hampshire to the State House in Concord, to the Samantha Bee Show, to an interview with the BBC and MSNBC. Her cause has been written up in the New York Times, Time Magazine, The London Time, The London Guardian, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Glamour Magazine, and Teen Vogue, as well as in articles in local newspapers and many online sources such as Refinery29.
In 2018, Cassie saw three bills pass both the NH House of Representatives and the NH Senate and hopefully soon there will be a law in place raising the marriage age floor in NH to 16 years old. A remarkable accomplishment that started with the passion of a 15 year old Girl Scout.