The Politics of Pretending to Protect Girls

How the worst offenders weaponize sexual violence against women to justify attacks on Muslims

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Over the past week, a familiar outrage cycle has taken over social media.

Right-wing influencers and Republican politicians circulated images claiming to show young girls being forced into marriage in Muslim-majority countries. Some of the posts were misleading. Some were fabricated. But accuracy was never the point. The goal was outrage.

The message was politically convenient. Muslim cultures have been portrayed as uniquely barbaric in Western media. Immigration was framed as a threat to women. Republicans once again cast themselves as the party standing between girls and sexual exploitation.

It is a powerful political story.

It is also one that collapses the moment you look at their record.

The same politicians warning Americans about child marriage overseas have repeatedly voted against laws that would ban child marriage in the United States, and have lobbied in favor of they very types of religious exemptions they are condemning.

Republicans have invoked the right of religion to govern over children’s and women’s bodies, while condemning the fabricated and percieved intolerances of other religions.

The same movement claiming to defend women has fought legislation designed to protect domestic-violence victims and survivors of sexual assault.

And the same networks spreading alarm about Muslim men abusing girls have spent years targeting Muslim Americans themselves.

In recent weeks, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has faced a wave of Islamophobic attacks online. Viral posts questioned his loyalty, accused him of supporting extremism, and framed his Muslim faith as incompatible with women’s rights.

The attacks followed a familiar pattern. Muslim identity itself becomes portrayed as suspicious, often through insinuations about gender violence or cultural oppression.

That framing has become a staple of Republican political messaging.

But when it comes to protecting women and girls in the United States, the voting record tells a very different story.

Across the country, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly voted against legislation designed to prevent sexual exploitation, close rape loopholes, protect domestic-violence victims, and ban child marriage.

And prominent Republicans have openly minimized allegations involving adult men and teenage girls — especially in their own party.

During the 2017 controversy surrounding Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, multiple women accused Moore of pursuing them when they were teenagers and he was in his thirties, including one who said she was fourteen when the he first molested her.

Several Republican officials defended Moore publicly. Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler argued that relationships between adult men and teenage girls were consistent with the biblical story of Mary and Joseph.

These rhetorical defenses stand in stark contrast to the way Republican politicians frequently describe child marriage and gender violence when the subject involves Muslim societies abroad.

In the past few years alone, Republican lawmakers in Missouri, West Virginia, Montana, Mississippi, and South Dakota have helped defeat or stall legislation that would have banned child marriage.

This is not a marginal issue. Research examining U.S. marriage records found that nearly 300,000 minors were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2018, and about 90 percent of those marriages involved a minor girl marrying an adult male.

Child marriage is widely recognized as a human-rights violation by organizations including the United Nations, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization because it is strongly associated with sexual exploitation, domestic violence, interrupted education, and lifelong economic harm.

Yet in much of the United States, the practice remains legal. There is no federal ban on child marriage.

Even where bans have passed, the debates reveal how cultural and religious pressure can shape the outcome.

When New Jersey considered legislation to prohibit marriage under 18, the Republican governor vetoed the bill, saying the law needed religious exemptions. He did so at the behest of the national haredi Orthodox Jewish organization who lobbied for lawmakers to make religious exemptions for Jewish minors.

Legislators ultimately rejected those exemptions, and in 2018 New Jersey enacted one of the nation’s strongest bans on child marriage, prohibiting the practice entirely without religious or parental exceptions.

The episode illustrated how even widely supported protections for minors can face resistance when longstanding religious practices collide with modern legal standards.

The contradiction between rhetoric and policy becomes clearer the closer you look at the stories behind the statistics.

One of the most widely documented cases is that of Sherry Johnson.

Johnson was 11 years old when she was raped by a 20-year-old man in Florida. When she became pregnant, the legal system’s response was not to protect her.

Instead, the state forced her to marry her rapist.

Her story was not unique. For decades, child-marriage laws in many states allowed judges or parents to authorize marriages for children well below eighteen, sometimes without any minimum statutory age at all.

Advocates say those laws often functioned as a way for adult men to avoid statutory rape charges when a minor became pregnant.

Opposition to child-marriage bans is only one part of a broader pattern.

When legislation designed to protect women from violence reaches the floor, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly resisted it.

In 2013, Congress voted on the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, a landmark law that funds domestic-violence shelters, sexual-assault prevention programs, and legal protections for victims.

The bill passed with bipartisan support.

But 138 House Republicans voted against it, objecting largely to provisions expanding protections for Native American women and immigrant victims of domestic violence.

At the state level, similar resistance has appeared repeatedly.

In Michigan, legislation passed in 2023 closing a longstanding marital-rape loophole that had treated certain forms of sexual assault within marriage differently under the law. While the bill ultimately passed with bipartisan support, Republican legislators lobbied against the reform.

In Maine, Republican lawmakers voted against establishing a statewide tracking system for sexual-assault forensic kits, a measure that helps prevent rape kits from being lost or ignored and allows survivors to track the status of their cases.

In Missouri, Republican legislators rejected proposals that would allow abortion in cases of rape or incest, even as the state maintains one of the strictest abortion bans in the country.

The contradictions also intersect with one of the most notorious sexual-exploitation scandals in modern American history.

Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking network operated for decades while cultivating relationships with wealthy and politically connected figures.

Among Epstein’s most widely documented political associations was Donald Trump, who socialized with Epstein repeatedly during the 1990s and early 2000s while both men were fixtures of the Palm Beach and New York social scenes.

In a 2002 interview with New York Magazine, Trump described Epstein as “a terrific guy” and added that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Epstein’s political connections extended further into Republican circles.

Former Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta negotiated the controversial 2008 non-prosecution agreement that allowed Epstein to avoid federal trafficking charges. Acosta later joined the Trump administration before resigning in 2019 after renewed scrutiny of the deal.

The Epstein case revealed something deeper about how sexual exploitation can persist within systems of wealth and political power, and was rife with ideals of Jewish supremacy as a justification for child sex abuse.

Yet despite that history, the political conversation about protecting girls continues to focus heavily on cultural condemnation of Muslim societies abroad.

Online extremist networks amplify those narratives by circulating misleading images depicting Muslim men with young girls, using them to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment and portray Muslim communities as uniquely predatory.

The trope behind these narratives is an old one — Western men cast themselves as rescuers of women from supposedly barbaric cultures elsewhere while ignoring abuses within their own societies.

If you have followed my work for any length of time, you know that protecting children and women from predatory men is one of the issues I care about most.

Violence against women and girls does not appear in only one form. It emerges through a web of laws, cultural norms, and institutional failures.

Today only a small number of U.S. states have fully banned marriage under eighteen without exceptions.

Delaware became the first state to do so in 2018. A handful of states have followed.

But in much of the country, minors can still legally marry with parental consent or judicial approval.

The legal framework that allowed cases like Sherry Johnson’s has not disappeared.

The same politicians who claim to stand as guardians of women routinely oppose the policies that would protect them. They warn Americans about exploitation abroad while defending legal systems that have allowed it at home.

They invoke distant cultures as symbols of oppression while resisting reforms demanded by survivors in their own states.

And they build political careers around the language of protection while voting against the laws that would make that protection real.

If protecting women and girls were truly the priority, the place to start would not be moral crusades against foreign cultures.

It would be the laws we pass, the votes we cast, and the accountability we demand from those who claim to protect them.

And Republicans are the last people with any moral authority to speak on this issue.