On July 1, law enforcement in Vinton County, Ohio, made a horrifying discovery. Four adults were keeping 16 children confined to a single 12-by-12-foot room in a filthy house. The oldest child, an 18-year-old girl, has a developmental disability and could not write her name. Several of the children were “unable to speak,” according to the Associated Press, and others were so ill they had to be flown by helicopters to nearby hospitals. “They looked like almost feral animals,” said state attorney general Andy Wilson. The adults — Gary Siders Sr., Christina Siders, and Gary Siders Jr. and his wife, Elizabeth Siders — face charges of child endangerment in a case that has become a national sensation. True-crime fanatics are breaking into the home to post footage of the cataclysm inside. Tabloids and influencers are calling it the “house of horrors” with a specific and lurid focus on 33-year-old Elizabeth Siders, who is the mother of the children and may have her own story to tell.

Days after the rescue, the Columbus Dispatch confirmed that Siders had married into the family when she was only 15 and her spouse, the younger Gary, was 18. She gave birth to their first child two months later and went on to bear 18 children, total, over the next 17 years. The Dispatch had also uncovered a pattern — three child marriages, including Elizabeth’s, in the same extended family. Is Siders a “victim or monster,” as NewsNation put it recently? On Facebook last month, a Kentucky woman took a more measured tone. Siders “did not become the headline overnight,” Donna Simmons wrote in a public post, because “cases like this are the end of a story that often begins generations earlier.” Simmons knows that all too well. She got married when she was 16 to a 31-year-old man who’d started grooming her inside a residential treatment facility. Her mother got married after completing eighth grade.

“My heart goes out to those kids, and they absolutely needed to be removed from that situation, and they need the resources to be able to heal and develop,” Simmons told me. “But we are so remiss as a society if we don’t recognize the victimization that she also endured.”

Child marriage is a fringe practice, even within the most conservative religious and cultural communities, but it is also more common than many Americans realize. It remains legal in 33 states, according to the advocacy group Unchained at Last, and in West Virginia, where Elizabeth Siders married, children can still wed at 16 with parental consent. Separate from the Siders case, Senator Dick Durbin and Representative Gwen Moore have reintroduced the Child Marriage Prevention Act, but some survivors are reluctant to support the bill because it leaves certain loopholes intact. State-level bans face opposition from the usual set of Christian conservatives but also some civil-liberties groups, who fear they infringe on the right to marry. Meanwhile, thousands of children are getting married every year, most of them girls. “There certainly is a lot more child marriage happening than........

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