A 11-year-old girl was forced to marry her rapist in order to close the investigation, before it goes deep into the roots of the case.

Sherry Johnson is from the area of Florida, it is a state in which there is no minimum age to marry. The man to whom she was made to marry is her rapist, who was 20 years old at the time.

Sherry told to the New York Times that a number of other young girls of her age at the conservative Pentecostal church were made to marry men, who are much older, which she said was usually to hide the rapes by the church elders.

She said that she herself was raped by both the minister and also a parishioner, and she also gave birth to her first daughter when she was just a 10 years old girl.

Marrying her rapist was one the way for the community to end a investigation into the rapes. Even a judge had approved the marriage in a way to end the police probe, telling that the young girl in court, ‘What we want is for you to get married’.

Now, as a adult woman, Sherry is calling for an end to the child marriage in the US – that is still far too common.

‘It was a terrible life,’ she said, remembering her life raising the children when she was just a little child herself. She missed the school, and she ended up giving birth to nine children in the total while her husband has periodically abandoned her.

‘They took the handcuffs from handcuffing him to handcuff me, by marrying me without me knowing what I was doing,’ she said.

The US has strongly denounced the child marriage in other countries, with one of the State Department document calling it a ‘human rights abuse that contributes to economic hardship’.

However, it has yet to make the strides in tackling child marriage closer to the home.

Wanted Florida Fugitive Since 2004 Arrested

Mrudula Duddempudi.