CHILD MARRIAGE: Rampant in the Muslim world
Posted: June 11, 2011 Filed under: Children Leave a comment »Forced early marriage thrives in many regions of the Muslim world, often in defiance of national laws. Compounding the problem are child marriages among first cousins which often results in severe birth defects.
"Whenever I saw him, I hid. I hated to see him," Tahani (in pink) recalls of the early days of her marriage to Majed, when she was 6 and he was 25. The young wife posed for this portrait with former classmate Ghada, also a child bride, outside their mountain home in Hajjah.
UK DAILY MAIL -(H/T Susan K)- Whole communities often prescribe to the notion that it is as an appropriate way for a young woman to grow up when the alternative is the risk she loses her virginity to someone before she marries. Wedding ceremonies are often held in the middle of the night, with the whole village keeping the secret for fear there might be a police raid.
Nujood Ali was ten when she fled her abusive, much older husband and took a taxi to the courthouse in Sanaa, Yemen. The girl's courageous act—and the landmark legal battle that ensued—turned her into an international heroine for women's rights. Now divorced, she is back home with her family and attending school again.
In a project for National Geographic magazine, journalist Cynthia Gorney and photographer Stephanie Sinclair travelled to Yemen and Rajasthan in India to investigate the extent of this shocking practice.
After celebrating with female relatives at a wedding party, Yemeni brides Sidaba and Galiyaah are veiled and escorted to a new life with their husbands. "Some rural girls see marriage as saving themselves from the control of their families," says an activist in the capital, Sanaa.
Few girls who are married off as children have any chance of an education but there are far worse consequences. Many are raped and have a low life expectancy due to the number of children they carry at such a young age. Girls suffer physical abuse and are too frightened to escape because they are threatened with death.
Asia, a 14-year-old mother, washes her new baby girl at home in Hajjah while her 2-year-old daughter plays. Asia is still bleeding and ill from childbirth yet has no education or access to information on how to care for herself.
In a case in Yemen, it was discovered that a ten-year-old girl Ayesha had been married off to a 50-year-old man. The journalists were told by her sister Fatima that ‘little Ayesha screamed when she saw the man she was to marry’. Someone alerted the police, but Ayesha’s father ordered her to put on high heels to look taller and a veil to hide her face. He warned that if he was sent to jail, he would kill Ayesha when he got out. The police left without troubling anyone and Ayesha now lives in a village two hours away with her husband. ’She has a mobile phone,’ Fatima said. ‘Every day, she calls me and cries.’
This group of young brides in a village in western Yemen were quiet and shy—until talk turned to education. Most of the girls, who were married between the ages of 14 and 16, had never attended school, but all say they still hope for an education.
The medical consequences are also extremely serious and in some cases fatal. One doctor based in the Yemeni capital Sanaa listed some of the medical consequences of forcing girls into sex and childbirth before they are physically mature – ripped vaginal walls and internal ruptures called fistulas which can lead to life-long incontinence.
Kandahar policewoman Malalai Kakar arrests a man who repeatedly stabbed his wife, 15, for disobeying him. "Nothing," Kakar said, when asked what would happen to the husband. "Men are kings here." Kakar was later killed by the Taliban.
Photos: National Geographic
Recent Comments