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| Tahani (in pink) married to Majed, when she was 6 and he was 25. The young wife with former classmate Ghada, also a child bride, outside their mountain home in Hajjah. (from here) |
Child marriage spans continents, language, religion, caste. Forced early marriage thrives to this day in many regions of the world— understood by whole communities as an appropriate way for a young woman to grow especially if they carry a risk of her losing her virginity to someone besides her husband, are unacceptable.
So in communities of poverty, where nonvirgins are considered ruined for marriage —where grandmothers and great-aunts are urging the marriages forward,—it's possible to see how the most dedicated anti-child-marriage campaigner might hesitate.
Sreela Das Gupta, from International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) said, "One of our workers had a father turn to him, in frustration."
"This father said, 'If I am willing to get my daughter married late, will you take responsibility for her protection?'
The worker came back to us and said, 'What am I supposed to tell him if she gets raped at 14?' These are questions we don't have answers to."
Early Marriage is Dangerous, why can't you see?
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| Asia, a 14-year-old mother, with her 2-year-old daughter. Asia is still bleeding and ill from childbirth yet has no education or access to information on how to care for herself. (pic also from Stephanie Sinclair) |
Al-Hamzi, a religious conservative, is opposed to the legislative efforts in Yemen to prohibit early marriage. Islam does not permit marital relations before a girl is physically ready, he said, but the Holy Koran contains no specific age restrictions and so these matters are properly the province of family and religious guidance, not national law.
Besides, there is the matter of the Prophet Muhammad's beloved Ayesha—nine years old, according to the conventional account, when the marriage was consummated. But there is a scholarly argument that Ayesha was actually older when she had marital relations—perhaps a teenager, perhaps 20 or more.
In any case her precise age is irrelevant, they would add firmly; any modern-day man demanding marriage with a young girl dishonors the faith. "In Islam, the human body is very valuable," said Najeeb Saeed Ghanem, chairman of the Yemeni Parliament's Health and Population Committee. "Like jewelry."
He listed some of the medical consequences of forcing girls into sex and childbirth before they are physically mature: Ripped vaginal walls. Fistulas, the internal ruptures that can lead to lifelong incontinence.
From Yemen, a newspaper reported that a bride from a village had been dropped off at a Sanaa hospital four days after her wedding. Sexual intercourse appeared to have ruptured the girl's internal organs, she had bled to death. She was 13 years old.
When Girls Fight Back
Nujood Ali suddenly became the most famous anti-child-marriage rebel in the world. The 2008 drama of the 10-year-old Yemeni girl who found her way alone to an urban courthouse to request a divorce, generated worldwide headlines. and more recently a book, translated into 30 languages: I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.
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| Her book review can be found here |
Nujood's father had forced her to marry a man three times her age; the man forced himself upon her the first night, despite supposed promises to wait until she was older. In the morning Nujood's new mother- and sister-in-law examined the bloodied sheet approvingly.
The surprise was that Nujood fought back.
She had escaped her husband and come home. She had defied her father when he shouted at her that the family's honor depended on her fulfilling her wifely obligations. Her own mother was too cowed to intervene. It was her father's second wife who finally gave Nujood a blessing and taxi money and told her where to go, and when an astonished judge asked her what she was doing in the big city courthouse by herself, Nujood said she wanted a divorce. A prominent female Yemeni attorney took up Nujood's case.
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| So...young...and so brave! (interview can be found here) |
"Her case was, you know, the stone that disturbed the water," says one of the Yemeni journalists. News stories began appearing in English, first in Yemen and then internationally; and when she was finally granted her divorce, crowds in the Sanaa courthouse burst into applause.
Everyone Nujood met was bowled over by her unnerving combination of gravity and poise. She said she was living at home again and attending school (her father, publicly excoriated, had grudgingly taken her back), and in her notebooks she was composing an open letter to Yemeni parents: "Don't let your children get married. You'll spoil their educations, and you'll spoil their childhoods if you let them get married so young."
Social change theory has a fancy label for individuals like Nujood Ali: "positive deviants," the single actors within a community are able to defy tradition and instead try something new. Amid the international campaigns against child marriage, positive deviants now include the occasional mother, father, grandmother, teacher, village health worker, and so on—but some of the toughest are the rebel girls themselves, each of their stories setting off new rebellions in its wake.
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| So young, and so...happy! (also from Stephanie's website) |
My edit: Hebatlah. Saya kagum! Dalam zaman di mana anak-anak kita belum tamat belajar lagi sudah mahu kahwin, ada pula anak-anak Muslim di sana yang bersungguh-sungguh mempertahan haknya untuk belajar dan hidup sebagai kanak-kanak biasa. Benar, Nabi Muhammad SAW berkahwin dengan anak gadis. Namun kalau hendak dikatakan mengikut Sunnah, banyak lagi Sunnah yang boleh diamalkan oleh lelaki zaman sekarang. Contohnya cara nabi berkahwin dengan balu dan janda, serta layanan penuh kasih sayang dan sabarnya kepada isteri-isterinya itu.
(revised from here: "Too Young To Wed by Cynthia Gorney with pictures from Stephanie Sinclair gallery photography. more here)
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