The BBC’s America First series reported on Angel, who was 13 when her mother forced her to marry and start a family. ‘I felt like a slave,’ she says of her childhood. Zimbabwe, Malawi and El Salvador have recently banned child marriage, but it remains legal in the USA - and half of states have no set minimum age below which you cannot get married. Recently the Independent reported that in the last fifteen years, more than 200,000 children were married in the USA. The minimum age for marriage is usually 18, but there are exemptions - such as parental consent or pregnancy - which allow younger children, sometimes as young as ten, to tie the knot. See