Child Brides

[ This is more of collating information than blogging. I read a story on Times & then dug out few more]

Her name is Reem Al Numery. 14 years old. More than half of my age. She is from Yemen and was married in 2008 when she was 12, to her 30 year old cousin. I stumbled upon her story in Time's "the 100 most influential people in the world". She is a child rights activist who had the courage to defy her father and filed for a divorce after being raped and tortured by the man she was married to. She now lives with her mother. Her divorce has not been granted by the Yemeni court, as she needs her father's consent as a minor and has to wait till she is 15 to file for her divorce. Her father has threatened to kill her for damaging the family reputation. In 2008, she was awarded the "Women of Courage" award by US State Department.

Nujood Mohammed Ali is 12 years old. She was married when she was nine and at ten, Nujood became Yemen's first child bride to legally end her marriage.

Three months into her marriage, she ran away from home,went to a courthouse on her own and waited till she could meet a judge and said he wants a divorce. Why? "I hate the nights" she told her lawyer. "I wanted to protect myself," she says, "and other girls like me."

Her "father", a former street sweeper and now a beggar, has 16 children, two wives, and no job. One of Nujood’s sisters had been raped, another kidnapped and the father said the marriage was to save Nujood from a similar fate. "When her father heard the kidnapper was eyeing Nujood, he thought marriage would save her."

She has co-authored a book with a french author titled "I am Nujood, aged 10 and divorced" and has joined school in Sana, Yemen's capital. She now supports her family with the royalties from her book and her family treats her with respect as she is the main bread earner.

Eight year old denied divorce by Saudi court

A court in Oneiza in central Saudi Arabia has dismissed a divorce petition by the mother of an eight-year-old girl whose father married her off to his friend, a man in his 50s, as a debt settlement.Newspaper reports said the court argued that the mother did not have the right to file such a case on behalf of her daughter and said that the petition should be filed by the girl when she reaches puberty.

Facts & figures

• Yemen has one of the world’s lowest rankings for gender equality, according to the United Nations.
• Poverty often leads to child marriage since a typical Yemeni earns about $900 a year, and marrying off girls means fewer mouths to feed.
• Yemeni law allows girls of any age to wed, but it forbids sex with them until the indefinite time they’re “suitable for sexual intercourse.” 
• The average age of marriage in Yemen’s rural areas is 12 to 13, a recent study by Sana University researchers found.
• Yemen has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.
• Child marriage is deeply rooted in local custom here, and even enshrined in an old tribal expression: “Give me a girl of 8, and I can give you a guarantee for a good marriage"
• Yemen once set 15 as the minimum age for marriage, but parliament annulled that law in the 1990s, saying parents should decide when a daughter marries. A February 2009 law set the minimum age for marriage at 17, but it was repealed and sent back to parliament's constitutional committee for review after some lawmakers called it un-Islamic.
• Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh, Saudi Arab's grand mufti, told Al Hayat newspaper that those saying ten or 12-year-old girls are too young to marry are being 'unfair' to them. He thinks, if girls receive proper upbringing by the family, age is not an issue to uphold the family and marital responsibilities

My views

I was appalled by the stories i read on the Internet. I don't want to read Nujood's book. I am scared that her experience might haunt me with nightmares. I don't have the courage to think and read about what she might have gone through.


Are these propaganda by western media to show how "backward and barbaric" the middle east and Muslims are to justify their war? i asked myself. One reader commented on the Glamour story on Nujood that " how can she prove rape as there was no witnesses. Law requires 4 witnesses to prove rape. why is it ok for western teenagers to get boyfriends and experiment and get pregnant?" Damn the westerners he said for trying to demean the culture and religion of a region to further their selfish interest. "We must uphold our culture" he feels.

I am not a religious authority or a cultural activist. I cannot comment on whether it's the West's ill motives. But hey, shouldn't Human Rights be above all religious and cultural distinctions? Isn't Human Rights universal?Aren't we all born as human beings and then given our religious and cultural identities based on which family we are born into and where we are born?

Treating a daughter as a property for debt settlement, forcing a child to marry, denying her the legal right to even ask for a divorce - i do not believe that the God who has created us all, the God who is the source of all things beautiful, would support any of these.

Sources & more information

• Glamour Magazine (http://www.glamour.com/women-of-the-year/2008/nujood-ali-and-shada-nasser)
• Divorced Before Puberty, By Nicholas D. Kristof (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/opinion/04kristof.html)
• BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8026545.stm)
• The Daily Mail ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1115624/Its-injustice-NOT-marry-girls-aged-10-says-Saudi-cleric.html#ixzz0nJh2VeLL)
• huffingtonpost (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/22/top-yemeni-clerics-attack_n_508845.html)

I was pleasantly surprised to read this positive comment about Bangladesh in the New York Times article: "Consider Bangladesh. After it split off from Pakistan, Bangladesh began to educate girls in a way that Pakistan has never done. The educated women staffed an emerging garment industry and civil society, and those educated women are one reason Bangladesh is today far more stable than Pakistan."

At least, the legal age of marriage in Bangladesh is 18 and rights of a child is acknowledged on paper. However as Pathfinder reports, because there is no birth registration system, compliance with the law is negligible. The median age of marriage for women currently 20-49 years old in Bangladesh is 14.8 years.